


Ad Pavonem

by Lomonaaeren



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Aurors, Birds, Crack, Jealousy, M/M, Master of Death Harry Potter, Mystery, Peacocks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-21
Updated: 2017-04-17
Packaged: 2018-09-01 06:24:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 29,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8612698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren
Summary: Draco Malfoy, who had seemed to be staying out of trouble after the war, has been connected to smugglers of Dark artifacts. Harry goes to investigate…and runs afoul of a defensive spell at the Manor that makes it highly improbable he can complete his mission. Much worse, Draco doesn’t even know the defensive spell has been triggered.





	1. His In

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! This story is ridiculous!
> 
> It will probably have seven or eight chapters, and update on Sundays. The title is Latin for "to the peacock."

“I don’t know if we should trust him with the spell.”

“He already knows about it, sir.”

Harry sighed and raised his hand to knock on Robards’s office door. Of course Robards, who for some reason had decided that Harry was a menace as an Auror even though he always got the criminal he was searching for, thought Harry shouldn’t know about the spell that had been invented to let the Aurors track Apparitions.

Harry had been instrumental in helping to _develop_ the spell, but Robards was perfectly capable of ignoring that when he chose to.

“Come in!” called Louis Calzade, the Deputy Head Auror and the only sane voice in the higher ranks of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. Harry had heard a lot about how great Amelia Bones was, though. He wished, as he stepped into the Head Auror’s office, that he’d known her.

The office was covered with clutter: awards, trophies, photographs, old case files, tattered Auror robes that Robards never seemed to take home, a softly pulsing blue orb that Harry frankly avoided every time he came in here, disempowered Dark artifacts, and the perch for Robards’s raven. The raven gave Harry a tormented look every time he came in. Harry had offered to buy the bird once or twice, but Robards always refused.

Now, towering behind his desk with narrowed, considering eyes, he looked as though he would throw Harry out for trying to make the offer. Harry sighed and stood patiently in front of the desk, since the one chair was covered by a complete set of crockery.

Calzade, a thin man a few years older than Bill with dark hair and dark eyes and an expression much like the raven’s, did his best to smile. “Hello, Auror Potter. You know that spell we’ve developed to track Apparitions?” He ignored the finger Robards laid across his mouth, and the scandalized look he got. “We’ve used it to track several different Dark artifacts smugglers now, and they’re all going one place.”

Harry raised his eyebrows. “Where?” They’d tried for months to track the ring they knew were working together, but never had any luck, since they all seemed to pick up their consignments separately and then go on a wild series of Apparition jumps.

“Malfoy Manor.”

Harry would have sat down if not the likelihood of crushing six china plates. “ _Really_?” Malfoy had become ostentatiously reformed after the war. It probably helped that his father was in prison and his mother had become involved in charity work to such an extent that she traveled much more than she lived in the Manor. Malfoy could play the repentant little bugger all he liked, with no parents looming behind his shoulder.

“You didn’t think that picture he presented was the _real_ one, did you?” Robards growled at Harry, and then turned and talked to Calzade in what he thought was a whisper. “This is why he shouldn’t know about the spell!”

The raven let out a muffled choke and buried its head under its wing. Calzade looked as if he was wishing for wings so he could do the same.

“Um. Anyway.” Calzade cleared his throat. “We’d like you to be the one who investigates, Auror Potter. You’re one of our few Aurors who knows the layout of Malfoy Manor, and the only one who might be able to persuade Malfoy, if he uncovers you, that you’re there for worthwhile reasons.”

Harry nodded slowly. He _was_ the only Auror who had approached Malfoy since the war, although he’d done it mostly as a trainee: to return his wand, to tell him that his father’s sentence in Azkaban had been extended to life after Lucius killed another inmate, and to ask how he _was_ and what progress he was making in getting the Mark off his arm. “All right. You want me to begin immediately?”

“No, Potter, next week!” Robards barked. “Of _course_ now!”

Calzade immediately stepped forwards as if he thought he could shield Harry from what Robards wanted somehow. “Come on,” he breathed to Harry. “I’ll escort you out and make sure that you have all the information you need.”

Harry nodded but didn’t speak until they were out in the corridor again. Then he studied Calzade. “Do you think he’s mad?”

“No. Under the pressure of the job, he’s getting so he can’t _do_ the job, though.” Calzade grimaced and flicked a dark comma of hair out of his eyes. “And soon I’ll be forced to take over.”

Harry sighed. “Well, thank you for what you’ve done so far. Where’s a map I can use, so that I can check for myself that those smugglers were going to Malfoy Manor?”

“You really want to believe in his innocence.”

“Of course I do. I think he did reform after the war. He was just a terrified kid at the time.”

Calzade nodded once and started walking down the corridor ahead of Harry. Harry couldn’t help but watch Calzade’s narrow shoulders and slim arse as he moved. It was a shame that he was completely straight, and had told Harry so gently when Harry had tried to ask him out a few years ago.

Harry sighed. _Half the time I have to just look and dream. Damn, I really need to find someone to date for a while._

*

Harry finished the wand movements of the spell, and sat back to watch as the map that Calzade had given him lit up. The spell the Aurors had developed worked only with a map, and even that had to be printed on special parchment with goblin-made ink. They weren’t truly worried about anyone else being able to duplicate it easily.

Harry sighed as he watched blue sparks come to life at multiple Apparition points around the British Isles, and become trails of blue flame. Each trail showed a spark where one of the smugglers had Apparated to some other point, and then became a trail again tracking their magical flight through nothingness to the next point.

Seen like this, there could be no doubt. Malfoy Manor was the center of an enormous flower of blue lines.

Harry wanted to believe that Malfoy himself had nothing to do with it. He knew from his visits that there were enormous wings Malfoy had simply shut down, either because of bad memories or because he didn’t have the house-elves to deal with keeping them clean and open anymore. Smugglers could have a wild party in there and Malfoy would never be the wiser.

But it seemed a lot less likely that he wouldn’t notice so many people going in and out of his wards.

Harry nodded. He almost hoped that Malfoy _did_ find Harry sneaking around his property and confront him. Harry would do his best to serve the true purpose of the mission, which included spying on Malfoy’s doings, but he liked everything being open and honest so much better.

 _And damn it, I really did think he’d reformed._ Maybe that was one reason Harry had visited Malfoy even when he didn’t have to: because they seemed so similar. All they’d both wanted after the war was peace.

*

Harry sighed as he prowled the outside of the Manor’s wards. He couldn’t get through them without causing all sorts of commotion, unless he used one advantage he’d been carefully avoiding for as long as he could.

He _could_ sense small weaknesses in them, though, like doors locked to all but people with the key. Whether Malfoy knew about them or not, people were getting through his supposedly impenetrable defenses and using parts of his Manor for—things. Perhaps it was something Lucius had done before he went to prison. The smugglers all wore masks and glamours layered on glamours, and the Aurors didn’t actually know any of their identities. They could be old friends of Lucius’s.

Harry scowled a little at himself. _Yes, you need to believe in suspects’ innocence until they’re proved otherwise, but you sound desperate to make excuses for him._

Harry shook his head in the next second. He had done his best not to let his emotions control him since he began his Auror training, but he had also had to learn to listen to his instincts. One of the things they told him was that Malfoy couldn’t have feigned the relief Harry had seen in his face when he spoke about the end of the war. He had honestly never been that good a liar. Look at how badly he’d failed to act confident and without stress during their sixth year.

_Someone could have changed his mind for him, though. The Imperius Curse…_

That was another hole in his perceptions that Harry had had to learn to repair. He’d bungled several early cases because he’d never thought of the Imperius Curse as an explanation, simply because he was immune to it himself.

Now, he settled back against one of the stone walls surrounding the Manor grounds and listened to the cries of the peacocks in the garden. He’d tested his magic gently against every portion of the wards that looked weak and against all those locked doors, and each time, angry power had risen in response. He wasn’t going to get anywhere like this.

Harry held out his hand and closed his eyes. Sparks of magic formed over his palm. He knew that he would see a dark flame burning there if he looked.

He didn’t look. After the one time he’d seen his secret weapon’s arrival and nearly lost every meal he’d eaten for a week, he had decided he’d never look again.

“I need you,” he said.

There was a note like someone playing a fiddle made of his bones, the only beautiful part of the process, a ringing, deep noise like a hunting horn. Harry opened his eyes and stared at the Elder Wand lying across his palm.

It could look so _innocent_ if you didn’t know what it was.

Harry grimaced. He had discovered enough lore on the Deathly Hallows that he was fairly certain he could break the damn thing’s power if he didn’t die violently with _it_ in his hand. That meant he only used it for peaceful or defensive processes, and always sent it away again when he was going to actually fight.

But its power hummed and pulled at him, and Harry knew how easy it would be to give in, to tell himself that it was only this one time that he was going to use it, that these particular enemies needed to be defeated…

Harry sighed and reached out with his magic through the Elder Wand; he had never wielded it like an ordinary wand. He had never needed to, with the connection to Death that he had singing through him whenever he chose to pay attention to it.

He touched the remnants of death all through the grounds, something that was always going to happen whenever living things existed in a space. The only places Harry couldn’t find something to influence were utterly bare ones of stone or water, with no rodents or insects or plants or other small lives at all.

The Malfoy Manor grounds, crowded with grass and peacocks, flowers and house-elves and mice, had no chance against him.

“Bring me in,” Harry whispered, as his power brushed against the corpse of a mouse lying motionless next to a stone.

The power latched on, and for a minute Harry felt the mouse’s life and death, knew the strike of a clawed paw that had killed it, and the nest it was born in, and then he flowed and vanished along the path Death had created for him. He would land next to the corpse and be fully within the wards. Luckily, he was fast with the Disillusionment Charm—

But then, something went wrong.

Something gripped him and grabbed him and shook him. Harry gasped. It was sparkling magic, like opals, a stream of white light and a storm of beating wings and something else that he didn’t recognize—

_Life magic._

The answer seemed to originate in the Elder Wand, not him. Harry shook his head. No wonder he hadn’t sensed it. Life was the opposite of Death and a blind spot in his defenses. He wouldn’t have sensed it if the living animal that had killed the mouse was standing right over its corpse, either. He resigned himself to getting tangled up in this ward, whatever it was, and having to explain the situation to Malfoy after all.

Except that didn’t happen. He did land beside the corpse of the mouse, but there was no Malfoy running towards him. Harry stared around. There were odd shadows and moving lights in the distance, where firelight shone through the windows of the Manor.

“What is going _on_?” he tried to mutter to himself, but a shriek came out of his throat instead.

Harry tried to turn, but he stumbled. There was something behind him, heavy and dragging, and his arms were bound behind his back, and altogether he felt as though someone had wrapped him in a sack with ropes covering it and attached a boulder to his tailbone.

He struggled frantically to free his arms, another shriek breaking free from his throat, and then his arms were free after all, his feet left the ground, the dragging weight seemed to fold up and follow him—

And Harry was airborne, his _wings_ supporting him through a flight of a few meters before shock made him fold them and crash to the ground again.

He stared back over his shoulder, and saw the weight twisted up behind him. He shook it, trying to get it to go away, his mind still scrambling, and then the full glory of his tail unfolded and there he was, shaded by dozens of drooping white plumes, marked with pale blue eyespots. One of them had shadows of the same carvings on it that had decorated the Elder Wand.

Harry craned his neck back and forth, and finally made out what he was looking at. The tail of a peacock. A white Malfoy peacock, to be precise.

His voice came out as a sharp cluck, but what he _meant_ to say was, “Oh, _shit_.”

He’d never heard of a Transfiguration like this, based on pure life magic, much less something that could transform an artifact like the Elder Wand.

Which meant he had no idea how to reverse it.

Which meant he was stuck as a peacock on Malfoy lands until he did.

It was really frustrating being unable to swear.


	2. The Peacock's Call

Thank you for all the reviews!

_Chapter Two—The Peacock’s Call_

Draco sighed as he cradled the cup of mulled wine between his hands and stared into the fire. The echo of the slammed door still hung in the room.

But given what Pansy was asking of him, and the kind of trouble Draco’s father had got into during the war, how _could_ he do anything but refuse?

Draco sipped from the wine again and let his gaze wander around the drawing room. It was done up with lots of gilt and silver and flashing jade figurines from his grandmother’s time, ugly even by Malfoy standards. Of course that didn’t mean one could _change_.

Not the inside of his house, anyway. But Draco was trying to change his soul, and his former friends made it…difficult.

He put down the wine when he heard a tap on the window. Either Pansy or Blaise would have sent him a letter trying to get him to house the smugglers, he reckoned. They weren’t ones to give up on a course of action until they’d tried every sort of persuasion.

But when Draco went over to the window, he stared. A peacock was balanced on the sill outside, staring back at him. This one had an especially long and shimmery tail, and Draco didn’t think he’d ever consciously noticed him before. There was also an odd green color to its eyes. That might only be the reflection of the jade figurines in the window, though.

“And just who are you?” Draco murmured. He heard his voice and the playfulness in it, and he wanted to shake his head at himself. The peacock was a peacock, nothing more than that.

It was behaving a bit oddly for one, though. It raised one foot and knocked on the glass like a human being, then stalked back and forth and glared imperiously at Draco. Then it listed to one side as if unused to the weight of its tail, and nearly fell off the sill.

Its wings unfolded, and it fell and flew into the darkness.

Draco snorted and felt a faint smile lingering on his face even as he turned back to the fire and the decision he had to make, which would probably end his friendship with at least one person. He could see why his father had kept peacocks around, even though Draco himself didn’t care about them as a symbol of beauty and wealth in the same way.

Now, though…

Draco sat down in front of the fire and considered. In truth, it wasn’t the decision he had to make. It was the way he would phrase the letter he intended to write.

Because he had no intention of going back to what he had been during the war, no matter how much Pansy and Blaise begged and pleaded.

*

_Well, that was useless._

Harry stalked towards the house again, and then had to stop because one claw had caught in his dragging train. He could feel frustration welling up in his throat, but he knew it would only come out as a useless shriek instead of the cursing he needed.

He had thought Malfoy might at least open the window to a peacock acting so strangely. But instead, it seemed he thought Harry was _amusing_.

Harry beat his wings and screamed in frustration. That only brought other screams echoing back towards him. But no other peacocks showed up. It seemed most of them were sleepy now that the sun had gone down.

_I have to let Malfoy know that I’m no ordinary peacock…_

Then Harry paused, his neck tilting back and forth in little jerks that he couldn’t quite control. Did he _have_ to? Really? Surely Malfoy should know that he had a defensive spell on the house that would turn people into peacocks, and that meant he would check on it occasionally and realize that some of his birds were humans?

Harry bobbed his head once. Malfoy would probably figure out that he was someone trapped soon, with no help from Harry. And in the meantime, Harry had a little time and an unparalleled opportunity to figure out if there was someone hiding in the Manor.

Harry trotted towards the side of the Manor that he knew was the unused one, huffing and clapping his wings as he did so. He missed his longer stride as a human. Walking as a bird seemed so _limited._ Not only did he have that bloody great tail, he kept having the feeling that he could get along faster if he spread his wings to help. But most peacocks weren’t good fliers.

_Most peacocks aren’t humans who could have been professional Quidditch players, though._

Harry paused at that thought, and glanced around. There were no other peacocks in sight. He supposed it was the time of night they roosted. They might not make a clatter that would alert Malfoy if…

This time, when he spread his wings and did his best to fly, he did it with the consciousness of his tail behind him, and how it would drag, and how different his body was from the one he was familiar with, instead of letting the peacock instincts panic him. He actually flew a good way before he had to land, and then he ran a short distance and took off again.

By the time Harry arrived at the fresh earth next to a flowerbed and landed behind a huge rosebush, he was feeling quietly pleased with himself.

That only lasted until he saw the footprints in the dirt. He once again tried to swear, and once again had it come out as a squawk. _They were here! They were actually here this evening! If I’d known about the bloody protection spells…_

Stalking around, Harry could discern a few telltale signs that these were probably the footprints of smugglers, and not people who just wanted to visit the Manor for whatever reason. For one thing, they were coming from behind a hedge, around the rosebush, and towards the side of the wing that wasn’t being used by Malfoy. They would have no reason not to approach the front door if they were invited guests.

For another, they wore heavy boots, heavier than Harry usually saw except on fellow Aurors and people who worked with animals, and dragged a heavy travois behind them, from the marks. Harry crowed a little and rattled his tail against the ground. The smugglers they’d been trying to track had ingredients and objects among their treasures that resisted being shrunken or moved with magic. They practically had to use heavy boxes set with the kinds of wood and metal that would protect the things inside.

And…

Harry honestly didn’t know if he would have seen it if he wasn’t so close to the ground, but there was the glint of something bright and jeweled in the furze near the rosebush. He darted out his neck and snatched it up with a movement that felt natural. He supposed a real peacock would use that to eat an insect or something.

_Ugh. I refuse to remain a peacock long enough to find out._

When he shook it out so he could see it dangling beneath his beak, he realized it was part of a leather band set with a radiant red jewel that resembled a dimmed ruby. Harry wanted to dance and drum and fan out his wings. The one smuggler they’d almost caught had been wearing a band like this. They hadn’t been able to catch him, but some of the magical theorists in the Ministry had said they suspected such jewel magic could keep the band together and let them Apparate with those objects that usually resisted being moved by magic.

_Apparate, but not avoid dragging them once they got there._

Harry’s triumph lasted only until he remembered that the Ministry already _thought_ Malfoy was guilty. Bringing them proof like this—once he convinced them he was Harry Potter and not a peacock—would make them arrest first and ask questions later unless Harry had other means of proving Malfoy didn’t know about it.

 _The footprints don’t come from the side where he would see them._ But Harry knew Kingsley and the others might point out that Malfoy could have invited the smugglers in, then ignored their comings and goings, just wanting to take a cut of the profit instead of supervise them all the time.

Harry made a clucking noise of distress and faced the house again. Until and unless he could get back to normal, his only hope for getting some kind of proof on the side he believed was right was Malfoy himself. Harry would have to break his delicate “cover” and convince Malfoy to cooperate with him.

*

Draco turned over. He was dreaming about rain, about the night that he’d realized his friends had turned into other people, people more obsessed with money than even social respectability. It was a stupid memory that stuck with him long after it should have left, but he could hear the rain tapping on the windowsill while behind him, Blaise and Pansy argued.

_Tap. Tap. Tap._

Draco rolled over, muttered unhappily as his foot got caught in the covers, and then sat up and realized he was awake. He looked at the window, wondering. It hadn’t been supposed to rain tonight, although of course weather did what it wanted—

He narrowed his eyes when he saw the peacock sitting on the windowsill looking at him. Draco never doubted it was the same one.

“What are _you_ doing here?” he asked.

The peacock, unsurprisingly, didn’t answer. It hammered on the glass with its bill again, glanced down as if it was contemplating doing it with a foot, and then opened its beak and screamed so loudly that Draco jumped. It probably would have woken guests, if he’d had guests.

“I have no idea what you want,” Draco told it firmly, standing up and walking over to the window to scare the stupid bird away. “But you have plenty of food and plenty of water, and you can go perch until the morning. Your kind are supposed to go to sleep at night anyway. Go on! Shoo!”

He flapped his hands at the glass. The peacock gave him the most monumentally unimpressed look Draco had ever seen on a bird.

“ _Go on_ ,” Draco said, and opened the window. That forced the peacock to flutter up, but amazingly, instead of wandering away, it landed on the sill again, still staring at Draco. This close, Draco could see every detail of the gleaming eyes and the way the white feathers crisscrossed over its breast. “ _Go away_.”

The peacock screamed at him and pointed with one wing back over the gardens. Draco stared along the direction of the pointing, then shook his head. What was he doing? The peacock was only a bird.

A bird who had somehow found him twice, not only in his study, but where he slept, which was in a totally different wing of the house. A peacock who had tapped only on these windows, as far as Draco was any judge. Certainly no bird he owned had ever done this before.

Draco wasn’t accustomed to thinking of peacocks as either smart or stupid. He wasn’t accustomed to thinking of them at all. But now he reached out and pulled on his boots without taking his gaze from the one near his window.

“Go away,” he did try, once more.

The peacock gave him a dead-on stare that Draco _knew_ no bird had ever favored him with. They tended to look at the world with their heads on one side, trying to see around the sides of their beaks.

“Lead on,” Draco said, to see what would happen, and to his amazement, the peacock took off, soaring into the darkness and landing not far away. At least the laws of nature hadn’t changed so much as to make peacocks good fliers. And the white feathers shone in the darkness, letting Draco catch up easily.

He shook his head as he climbed out the window, dropped lightly to the ground with the aid of a Cushioning Charm, and sped along the peacock’s trail.

_I must be mad._

*

_He’s coming!_

Harry pranced around and around the smugglers’ footprints, not flaring his tail out even though he desperately wanted to. He knew the feathers could stick out and sweep across the dirt and erase the footprints. He forced himself to stand still and arch his neck a little instead, then jab a clawed foot at the bootmarks once Draco was close enough.

Draco gave him a quite frankly enigmatic look, and knelt down to stare at the footprints. He was still so long that Harry started to wonder if he had mistaken things and maybe Draco had invited friends to stay over who left the marks. But then Draco drew his wand, and cast a Body-Bind at him.

Harry’s peacock instincts reacted faster than his Auror ones could to the sight of something coming at him. He clattered into the air away from it, and landed on the other side of the flowerbed, where he turned to give Draco the most reproachful stare a peacock could manage.

But Draco only shook his head and murmured, “You’re human. You must be,” casting again at him.

_Human, and trying to help you!_

But Harry reckoned he could see why that notion wouldn’t occur to Draco right away. He spun away from the next spell and darted back and forth, trying to see and not be chased too far away at the same time.

Draco hit him with a successful Body-Bind before he could think of some way to prove who he was. Then Draco stalked over and stood staring narrowly down at him, while Harry struggled wildly against conflicting instincts. Part of him knew it would do no good to struggle against the magic, but the rest of him wanted to fly, fly, fly, and there was _danger danger danger._

“Now,” Draco said softly, “we’ll see about this.” He aimed his wand at Harry and incanted the spell that would force an Animagus back into their human form.

Nothing happened. Draco lowered his wand and stared. Harry would have crouched there panting if the Body-Bind had allowed it.

He hadn’t thought the Animagus spell would work, and now his mind was dissolving into the mind of a frightened, hysterical bird.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Draco whispered. Then he went through a series of spells, starting with _Finite Incantatem_ and continuing with related ones, that would undo human Transfiguration. With the part of him that could still hope, Harry thought those might work.

They didn’t. Nothing happened except that Draco got so frustrated he actually stamped his foot, and Harry wore away at the spell as best as he could with his own magic. Well, he crouched in the frozen position and hoped it would end, which was all he was actually capable of doing.

“What _are_ you?” Draco asked, and knelt down by Harry as if he thought taking a closer look at his wings and tail would give him the answer.

The spell abruptly shattered, either because Harry had done something or Draco accidentally had. Harry screamed in his face and took off running, then flew when he thought he heard another spell coming towards him.

He landed in a small tree and sat there, shaking. Murmurs and rustling above him told him it was already full of white peacocks, but he certainly wasn’t about to go back out there with a mad Malfoy.

Harry tucked his head down against his breast and shivered all over. He had nearly lost his mind to the bird’s instincts. He might yet, if this went on much longer.

But Malfoy thought he was either an enemy or something he would probably want to capture and chop up for Potions ingredients. Harry couldn’t count on any help from him. He rattled his tail and ignored the sleepy protests of the other peacocks. He wondered why Malfoy hadn’t immediately jumped to the conclusion that Harry was a victim of whatever defensive spell he’d wound about the property.

The thought made Harry pause. It didn’t seem Malfoy’s style of spell, either before the war or since. He would have wanted to capture invaders the way he’d tried to do with Harry, and interrogate them.

_Unless he wasn’t the one who put the spell up._

Harry gave a soft, miserable hoot to himself, and ignored the way another peacock screamed in return. There had been a few days when Lucius had the Manor to himself, besieged as the Ministry and Aurors fought for a way in. He had finally given up after Draco stood outside and called for him to come out.

_What if he was the one who created this spell, and Draco knows nothing about it?_

Harry hunched some more. That meant this was going to be a lot more difficult than he’d thought.

But it didn’t _matter._ He had to keep going.

_If I can’t get help from Malfoy, then I’ll get it somewhere else!_


	3. Pale Shadows

 

Harry woke with a start when someone pecked him. It wasn’t the usual way he woke up in the morning, and when he tried to roll to the side and get out of bed, he flailed with his wings and fell a good portion of the way.

The peacock who had apparently pecked him gave him a dignified look and stalked away, tail dragging behind it. Harry shivered a little and stared around the Manor grounds, wondering if he would find Aurors already breaking in.

But there were none yet. Harry supposed they might be waiting to see what would happen, if he would reappear, or worried because a Malfoy who could eliminate Harry Potter was a more powerful enemy than they had counted on.

Meanwhile, the other peacocks were pecking at the grass around him, and Harry was hungry.

He trembled in a way that made his wings rattle at the thought of eating seeds, or insects, or whatever it was peacocks ate most of the time. He might have no choice if he got hungry enough. But he would at least make an _effort_ to be the human he was inside the feathers.

Harry stalked around the side of the house, aiming towards the crooked corner that had house-elves popping in and out of it all the time. To his dismay, he really couldn’t _smell_ much in this form, but he knew the busiest place for any house with elves was usually the kitchen, and they couldn’t all be cleaning Malfoy’s clothes or getting new dustcloths.

Sure enough, he found the right doorway, and peered in at a chaos of ovens and chopping knives and stirring spoons and small green arms doing all the tasks. Not one elf paid him the slightest attention.

And there was a huge piece of cooked and gleaming pork lying out in the middle of a table, getting ignored because no one needed it right now.

Harry studied the setup of the kitchen for a second, ignoring his own fear that the pork would get taken away while he did that. If it did, he would find something else. Malfoy’s kitchen was the size of a small kingdom.

When he was sure of what he wanted to do, he crouched and coaxed his weak wings into action.

He soared over the head of two elves stirring what looked like batter, landed on the shoulder of another one who lurched sideways in shock, fluttered over an oven that had one elf poised to open the door, landed on the table, snatched the pork, and turned around. Instead of making for the outer door, which already had elves blocking it, he ran hotfoot into the house.

The elves chased him, but they didn’t have the advantage Harry did, which was that he knew where he was going. And they did pop in and out in the house-elf version of Apparition, but they kept squeaking and getting in one another’s way, and they were clearly uncertain of whether they had permission to touch or injure Harry.

Harry finally managed to get into a room that had a heavy door shimmering with the taste and feel of magic. He turned around and dropped the pork on the floor and fluttered up, pushing with all his might (and feet) against the door. It slammed shut. Harry listened, cocking his head to get his ear as close as he could to the wood, but no house-elves popped in. There _were_ spells that kept them out of here if the door was closed, then. Harry had thought he’d felt them.

“You are the most unusual peacock I’ve ever seen.”

With a startled squawk and a fluttering that took him away from the pork, Harry turned around. Draco was seated at the table in the corner of the room, a small breakfast nook. There was a _Daily Prophet_ on his lap and a cup of something steaming in front of him.

“I know you’re human,” Draco continued in a musing voice, swallowing some of the steaming mixture and eyeing Harry like he was an interesting fossil. “Not an Animagus. But I don’t know why someone would _willingly_ turn into one of my father’s peacocks and come here, either.”

Harry put a possessive claw on the pork.

“Yes, yes, you can eat it,” Draco said, and rolled his eyes. “If you’re hungry enough to do that instead of discussing who you are with me first.”

Harry was, as a matter of fact, and he still didn’t know if he would be able to write anything with his claw that Draco could understand, assuming there was something here he could write with. He bowed his head and started tearing off small pieces of the pork, keeping an eye on Draco all the time.

But Draco didn’t draw his wand to hex or curse Harry. He looked far too interested—and amused—for that.

*

 _What_ is _the story?_

Draco was less irritated than he’d been last night, probably because he hadn’t been awakened out of a sound sleep this morning. He sipped his tea and ate his bacon and watched as the peacock picked bits of meat off the piece he had stolen.

He didn’t seem to really know how to use his beak and claws. Several times, he paused and stared down at his own foot, embedded in the pork, then shook his head in a distinctly un-avian gesture and went back to eating.

Draco couldn’t even be angry about the way the madman had broken into his house and stolen the pork. For one thing, he had plenty of other food for lunch and dinner. For another, it made Draco feel less crazy for suspecting the bird of being human at all.

It didn’t take much to fill the peacock up, though. He backed away from the pork when there was still a good portion of it left and stalked towards Draco’s table with determination, fanning his tail out behind him.

Draco put a casual hand on his wand, ready to defend himself if this was a real enemy. The peacock never stopped or slowed, though. It leaped up on the table and looked around as though considering Draco’s cutlery.

“For what purpose, I don’t know,” Draco said, and the bird turned its head. There was a glittering green eye fixed on him a second later.

Draco narrowed his own eyes a little. He knew peacocks normally had—well, not _green_ eyes. He couldn’t remember the usual color off the top of his head, but it was different than that. He leaned forwards, wondering if this was a clue to the man’s true identity.

The peacock whipped its head down abruptly and picked up a fork from the side of the table. Then it turned and rearranged two knives with a little push of its foot. Draco watched in utter incomprehension as it laid the two knives a short distance from each other, parallel with their sharp edges facing the side of the table, and laid the fork down in between them.

“What are you—”

Draco looked at the figure the peacock had made, and stopped speaking. It was an arrangement of metal, yes, but it looked stunningly like the letter H.

“That doesn’t help much,” he whispered, but he found himself pushing his empty cup and other utensils at the peacock as if that would help.

For long minutes, he thought it wouldn’t. The peacock made a clucking noise and scraped at Draco’s tablecloth with a claw that left rents in it. Even knowing the house-elves would repair those couldn’t stop Draco from narrowing his eyes in offense.

But the bird found what it was looking for. It seized the empty teacup in its beak and hammered it enthusiastically against the side of the table. The handle broke off. The peacock grabbed another knife and laid it down, then delicately placed the curved handle next to it, shoving until it was satisfied.

This time, it took more imagination for Draco to read the “letter” that had been placed in front of him. But it was undoubtedly a P, or meant to be, with the knife forming the side of it and the curved cup handle making the loop.

Draco had thought the next letter would be a vowel or something, that the peacock was trying to spell out a message. But when he looked at the two letters side-by-side, he swallowed. Only one person he knew with those initials had green eyes like that.

“Harry Potter?” he whispered, staring at the peacock.

Potter spread his tail out and danced back and forth, making several other dishes clatter to the floor with a ring of metal or crash of china. Then he pulled his feathers in and stood looking at Draco expectantly.

Maybe it was only that Draco was looking for it now, but he seemed to see a strange pattern of feathers on the peacock’s head that could have resembled a lightning bolt scar if he was human. And there were the green eyes.

“What happened?” Draco whispered.

He realized how stupid he had been a moment later, when Potter gave him an impatient glance. But he also leaped off the table and led the way to the door of the dining room. Draco got up and followed him. Potter had been clever in finding out ways to communicate so far, despite the limitations of his avian form. Perhaps he could be the same way now.

Potter stalked the corridors carefully after Draco opened the door, tilting his head back and sometimes making a soft squawk of what Draco thought was disgust. Finally he stopped in front of a portrait and made a noise like a chirp. Draco shook his head as he looked at the portrait.

“My ancestors can’t have used a spell that would turn people into peacocks. I would have known it. And I did see some of the flock hatched, and I can assure you, they’re not _all_ enchanted humans.”

Potter snapped his beak at Draco irritably and started tracing a pattern with his foot on the stone floor over and over again. He had to do it several times before Draco could “read” it, but then he figured it out. It was the letter L.

 _And I’m not stupid, either,_ Draco thought as he stared at the letter and shivered all over.

“You’re saying my father did this?”

Potter leaped up and down, clapping his wings emphatically. Draco swallowed and looked away.

Now that he thought of it…yes, Lucius would have had the time alone in the Manor before he surrendered to the Aurors to put such a spell on the house. It wouldn’t affect those who had a pass through the wards, like Draco and his friends, which was a good reason for him never to have noticed it. And in the end, the Aurors hadn’t broken through the wards. Draco’s father had surrendered and let them take him away.

 _He might even have done it partially to protect the secrecy of that spell,_ Draco thought. _Because he thought I would need it._

“Reee?”

Draco opened his eyes. Potter stood in front of him, one claw braced as if he thought he would have to lift it and scratch Draco’s leg. When he saw Draco looking at him, he lowered it and turned his head to the side in a clear, commanding gesture.

“I’m not sure exactly what you think I can do,” Draco said. “I mean… _what_ do you think I can do?”

Potter gave him a slow stare that didn’t even need him to spell anything out with cutlery or by drawing it. _Fix it, you fool._

“I have no idea what Father might have used,” Draco said helplessly. “There are hundreds of books in the libraries that I’ve never looked at, because I never wanted to study that kind of magic.” He shook his head. “And if it’s gone undiscovered this long, then I can’t find it by tracking Father’s signature or wand resonance, either.”

Potter’s flat look said that wasn’t his problem.

Draco blinked back, and abruptly the memory of the night before came to him, of Potter dancing like a mad thing next to those footprints in the mud. He frowned at Potter. “Did you come here alone?”

A sharp jerk of Potter’s head that couldn’t be anything but a nod. Draco tapped his fingers on his leg. “Then who were those footprints from?”

Potter began practically doing a tap-dance on the floor with his feet, apparently trying to draw letters. Draco tried to “read” them several times before he gave up and cast a spell that made blue light follow the course of Potter’s foot and then linger on the stone when he was done. The _extremely_ unimpressed look Potter gave him when he did that made Draco smile.

Even then, it wasn’t as though bird feet were well-suited for spelling things out. Draco managed to decipher an S and an M at the start of the word, which for a moment made him wonder things about Potter’s tastes in bed. But the next few letters were useless. Potter had done them too fast.

“Go more slowly on the third one,” Draco instructed, crouching down in case watching the movements more closely would tell him something more.

Potter gave a single, irritated flap, but he went back to drawing. This time, he went slowly, and it was apparent that the third letter was a U, and the fourth one a poor, lopsided excuse for a G. Draco opened his mouth to ask why Potter was insulting him, then abruptly realized what other word could begin that way, besides “smug” itself.

“Smugglers? Smugglers are using the _Manor_?”

Potter leaped up and down and flapped his wings and pecked Draco’s shoes. Draco drew his foot back at once, frowning.

“But the wards would have caught them and turned them into peacocks, too. They sure as hell didn’t do that.”

Potter tried to scratch something else out on the stone, but Draco had finally realized his own answer to the question. Blaise and Pansy didn’t turn into birds when they visited him, either.

“They’re invited?” He whispered the words, making Potter stop scratching to look at him. “Or they used to be, and their invitation through the wards was never revoked?”

Potter hopped so excitedly that Draco was frankly surprised he didn’t shit himself. Draco sat down again with a bump, feeling ill.

All that work he’d done to detach himself from his father’s legacy, and make it clear to his friends that he was never going back to the kind of life they wanted him to pursue, and it might all be for nothing. It seemed the smugglers were coming through the wards anyway.

“How sure are you of this?” he whispered, looking up to Potter.

Potter gave him another stare, and Draco nodded miserably. Potter wasn’t his best friend, but they had been on the same side since the war. If Potter had been uncertain whether it was happening or not, then he would never have brought it to Draco’s attention.

Of course, that _did_ bring up a question that should have started bothering Draco earlier. He sat up and frowned at Potter. “Why _are_ you here on your own? Why didn’t you come in with a troop of Aurors behind you?”

Potter suddenly became very interested in his claws.

“You didn’t know for sure?”

Potter bobbed his head without looking up.

“But if they sent you here…did you _volunteer_ to be sent?”

Potter gave a sullen kick at the floor and gave Draco a pleading look. Draco only stared back, his arms folded. “I’m _being_ cooperative,” he said. “I haven’t hidden anything from you, and I think you know that. I deserve some answers.”

Potter gestured with a claw at his beak, and Draco rolled his eyes. “You managed to communicate some complex concepts already. You’ll find a way to talk about this if you really want to.”

Potter sulked and drooped some more. Draco waited him out, while memorizing what a sulky peacock looked like for future reference. Of course, he hoped that he would never need to use the knowledge again, but he was hardly about to ignore anything useful.

Potter finally moved his head and started walking down the corridor again. Draco followed, perfectly willing to do so as long as it would let him keep an eye on Potter.

*

 _Calzade and Robards are_ both _going to be angry at me._

But Harry knew he couldn’t put off the moment any longer. At least Draco should manage to understand without much exertion why someone might have suspected him, whether or not Harry thought it was right or fair. They _had_ suspected him.

Harry peered in at the doors they passed, waiting until Draco opened them for him some of the time. He finally found what he was looking for, a fireplace with some soot in front of it that the house-elves hadn’t cleaned up. He bustled in and dipped one of his wings into the soot, ignoring the faint twinge at his heart when he saw the black darkening the white. It was a vain peacock instinct that would have kept him clean, not human ones.

“What _are_ you doing?”

Harry glanced at him, screeched, and ducked his head into the soot, blackening that, too. Then he scratched himself with one rapid foot—an instinct that was _still_ strange to him—and pointed the foot at Draco.

Draco’s eyes widened. “They think I’m getting back into Dark Arts.”

 _At least he understands symbolism,_ Harry decided with a sigh, and tapped the claw against his breast. Then he cleaned his wing with a few rapid strokes and turned around to gaze intently at Draco.

“You didn’t believe the same thing, but they made you come investigate,” Draco said in a heavy tone. “Yes. All right. So, how much time do we have before the Aurors invade?”

Harry didn’t have time to think about how he was going to answer _that_ particular question, since the walls of the house abruptly shook, and a voice enlarged by a _Sonorus_ Charm boomed, “Draco Malfoy, come out and surrender your wand, on suspicion of smuggling and kidnapping an Auror!”

“So,” Draco said into the silence, “that would be _none_.”


	4. Peacock Distraction

“What are we going to _do_?”

When he thought about it, Draco had no idea why he was asking _Potter_ that question. He had turned to him instinctively, but now he shook his head. Potter had only been _his_ savior in the most indirect of ways. And now he was affected by Malfoy magic, even if it was a spell Draco had had no idea about. He couldn’t save anyone.

Potter didn’t seem to know that. He stood in place, jerking his head around, staring at something so intently Draco turned around to see what it was. He noticed only empty air, and turned back with a sigh just as Potter raced towards the end of the corridor and flung himself into the air. There was a glass door there usually left half-open so the temperature in the attached greenhouse could be adjusted easily.

“Where are you going?” Draco asked. “You can’t get out that way—”

For an answer, Potter burst through the glass roof and out into the open air. Draco gaped after him. There was blood all over the sleek white feathers, and Potter landed with a scream and a flop of his wings that seemed to indicate something was broken.

The next minute, he ran towards the wall where the steadiest pounding on the wards was coming from.

Draco ran after him. At the moment, the only thing he could come up with was that Potter _wanted_ the other Aurors to think Draco had hurt him, and had added pain and wounds in the most dramatic manner he could.

Not that that would make sense when he had been communicating with Draco so calmly just a few minutes before, but…

Draco had become used to the world not making sense and changing in a minute, usually in a way that made things worse for him. He gritted his teeth and ran faster.

*

Harry sped up, using his wings to give himself a little extra beat or loft only when he absolutely had to. He knew he’d badly damaged the right one. It felt like a severed muscle. It wanted to flop instead of lie neatly folded, and the pain kept stabbing him with every movement he used it for.

But it would be all the better for his plan if the wound was real, so he paid no attention to it. Besides, it wasn’t like he hadn’t felt pain like this before, or worse. He really had better things to be worried about.

When he reached the outer wall of the gardens where the wards shimmered, Harry didn’t hesitate. He leaped up and screamed, loudly enough to attract some of the Aurors’ attention. Then he balanced himself against a sapling that grew beside the wall, raised a foot, and tapped the top of his forehead, where a mirror in the corridors had showed him a faint patch of feathers in the shape of a lightning bolt.

“What the _fuck_?” asked someone who sounded like Dawlish. But at least the pounding on the wards stopped, and some people came forwards to inspect him. Harry danced in place, and tapped his forehead again.

“Is it…Potter?” someone asked in disbelief.

Harry cocked his head and crooned softly. He didn’t tap the lightning bolt again. He was swaying and feeling dangerously as if he would simply fall off the wall. He leaned into the hands that rose hesitantly to receive him, Ron’s hands.

“He’s been _hurt_ ,” Ron said, and turned him around. Harry shrieked as he tried to keep his injured wing from being jostled, and Ron reached out and cradled him in a new position. His face was dark enough that Harry suspected he would have a hard time keeping his best friend from reacting harshly, though. “What do you think did this to him? _Malfoy_?”

Harry rapidly shook his head, and would have flapped his wings for emphasis if he could have. He clacked his beak instead, and then reached out and jabbed Ron’s wrist. Ron jumped and stared at him.

It was Kingsley, who stood towards the back of the group of Aurors, who understood first.

“Auror Weasley, you were wearing a wristband at one point that the smugglers left behind, correct? One that you hoped might help you track them down?”

“Yeah, useless rubbish…” Ron’s voice trailed off. “The _smugglers_ did this to you?”

Harry bobbed his head up and down as rapidly as he could. This was the best plan he could come up with literally on the fly. Let them assume that the smugglers had hurt him, even that they had transformed him into a peacock. As long as they didn’t suspect Draco.

“Then Malfoy must be working with them, the way we thought!”

 _Oh, Ron._ The only reason Harry didn’t hide his head under his wing and moan in distress was because he could hear Draco’s footsteps coming rapidly across the grounds. There were already Aurors aiming their wands at him, which would just make everything so complicated that Harry didn’t want to endure it.

So he didn’t. He fluttered over their heads, screaming at the pain in his wings, and landed on the grass in front of Draco. He spread his wings, and his tail, which luckily didn’t pull on as many muscles, to make a shield for Stunners.

Draco stopped moving. _At least he has the sense for that,_ Harry thought, and fixed his beady gaze on the Aurors. _Are you going to pay attention to us now, idiots?_

*

Draco had been preparing to slow down anyway. He’d been close enough to hear most of the conversation between Potter and his fellow Aurors. He was lying to them, of course he was, but he was doing it with good intentions.

Just intentions that Draco could hardly believe. Potter had _injured_ himself to do this.

And then Potter flew over, making himself bleed some more, and got in front of Draco like a guardian angel. Draco stared through a gap in the pale feathers down at the top of Potter’s head. He couldn’t see them from this angle, but he was sure that Potter’s green eyes would be glittering as ferociously as ever.

_He’s doing this for me. Why does he believe so fiercely that I’m innocent? I mean, I’m glad he does, but he didn’t have any real time to get proof before he got turned into a peacock. And then I tried to use a Body-Bind on him. Most Aurors would think that made me guilty…_

Draco didn’t have much time to wonder, because Weasley was snarling, “What did you do to him, Malfoy?”

Potter gave a screech of protest and spread his wings more widely. Draco winced when he heard something tear and saw more blood flowing. Potter acted as if he didn’t notice.

_That’s rather disturbing, when you think what it indicates about his experiences with blood._

“I want to know what you _did_!”

Draco swallowed and looked up. Weasley’s wand was aimed right between his eyes, which wasn’t such a surprise, when you thought about it. He controlled the impulse to flinch, especially when he thought about how many impulses Weasley had, and said, “Nothing. It’s apparently the smugglers who have been hiding in my _house_ that did this!”

Weasley paused a little at the outrage in Draco’s voice. It was real for all that the Aurors were wrong about the cause. Draco was almost speechless with rage at the thought that these people had been coming and going without him knowing, using the _Manor_.

_And Blaise and Pansy probably knew about it._

Draco dismissed the thought. It couldn’t help him now, and would probably only get him in trouble, at least with the Aurors. Weasley had lowered his wand, but most of them hadn’t.

“Did Auror Potter get into a battle with them?” the tall man Draco vaguely remembered was called Shacklebolt asked calmly. “And are they still here?” Two of the Aurors peeled off from the back of the group at that, and started stalking along the stone wall that surrounded Draco’s grounds as if they would spot some trace Draco hadn’t.

Draco gave a thin smile. He had the perfect mixture of lies and truth to tell them. “That’s what must have happened, although Potter had barely managed to convince me of who he was before he heard something I didn’t and took off flying towards it. I confused him with another of the birds on my grounds at first, and, I’m ashamed to say, spent some time chasing the wrong ones. I didn’t make it to the battle in time to help Potter out, before the smugglers Apparated out.”

“They can _Apparate_ off your land?”

“How did Harry get turned into a peacock?” Weasley demanded, his question mingling with Shacklebolt’s. Shacklebolt gave him an exasperated look that he didn’t seem to notice. He was far too focused on Potter.

 _Well, someone needs to be,_ Draco admitted.

“Yes, they can, because they have an exception in the wards,” Draco said shortly. “I’m not sure yet where they got it, whether they’re acquaintances of my father or two ‘friends’ of mine who kept trying to get me to join the smuggling trade. Rest assured, I’ll be changing that exception as soon as possible.” It would require more work with the wards than he had yet put in since he became head of the family.

“But _Harry_?”

“I found him like this,” said Draco. _True enough_. “I can only imagine that the smugglers either have a spell like this, or had a connection to the wards that enabled them to transform supposed trespassers into peacocks. It sounds like the kind of spell my father would have set up.”

There. Now, when they investigated, assuming they brought a ward expert along, they would find the holes and the defensive spell Lucius had set up exactly as Draco had speculated they would.

Potter slowly lowered his wings and tail when he seemed to realize that none of the Aurors were going to cast anything at Draco. He glanced back at him and bobbed his head in what looked like admiration, although Draco admittedly found it hard to read his facial expressions.

“Well, since Harry seems to think that you’re innocent and we have some things to investigate, we’ll leave you free for now.” Weasley managed to make it sound like a huge favor. Draco bit his tongue and spent a moment looking up at the sky, past the edges of Potter’s still-collapsing plumes. “But we need the names of those _friends_ of yours, Malfoy.”

“Of course. Pansy Parkinson and Blaise Zabini.”

A shocked murmur came from a few of the Aurors, but others were nodding. Draco smiled thinly. Blaise was a bit sophisticated in politics, and Pansy could make people underestimate her with her shrill voice and her fluttering eyelashes, but neither of them was as clever as they thought they were.

“And we’ll still have to have you come in for questioning,” added a heavyset Auror Draco didn’t know. “Not under arrest. But _questioning_. We need to know how to undo the spell on Auror Potter if it’s really part of your wards.”

“You can examine them for yourselves, but that’s not something I know,” Draco said, stepping cautiously around Potter. No one tried to Stun him or restrain him, although they did close in around him once he had crossed the stone wall. Weasley, meanwhile, reached out his arms, and Potter half-limped, half-beat his way across the grass and clambered into his friend’s hold, resting his head against his shoulder.

Draco stared at him as the Aurors guided him out to a point where they could Apparate. Potter looked sleepily back, and then closed his eyes as Weasley murmured a few basic healing spells to close the wounds.

_He did that for me. When he came here to investigate me in the first place._

Draco could hardly wait for the Aurors, or maybe for someone else, to find a way to reverse the transformation and put Potter back to normal. They needed to have a _talk_.

*

“Just how badly did they injure you, mate?”

Harry only shook his head as he held out his wings and let the animal Healer the Aurors had summoned check him over. She didn’t say much, grunting or clucking her tongue now and then, and sometimes muttering to herself about the sadism of people who would hurt animals. That he wasn’t really a bird, that he was really Harry Potter, didn’t seem to matter to her at all.

Ron sat down hard on the other side of the table—they were in a small room in the bowels of the Ministry—and looked at him. “Only you, mate.”

Harry winced as the torn muscles beneath his wing pulled back together, and bobbed his head a little. He could understand Ron’s sentiment even though he didn’t agree with it, not this time. Injuring himself had just seemed like the best tactic at the time to distract the Aurors’ attention from Draco and make them _listen_ for long enough that they wouldn’t take Draco into custody.

And thank Merlin Draco had had enough sense to play along. Of course, the only concrete proof he could tell them about was the footprints Harry had uncovered in the flowerbeds, but his mentions of his friends’ names showed he already suspected more than that.

Really, the case was over.

Then the Healer tapped her wand against his back, and Harry shrieked as a bolt of energy zipped through him, and flailed his wings. They felt normal again—well, as normal as they were going to get. But it did remind him of a truth he’d forgotten.

_No, it’s really not over until I manage to make the transformation back to human._

“I suppose you can’t tell us anything more about the smugglers?”

Harry gave Ron an apologetic look, or as apologetic as he could get when he looked like this, then glanced around. He was hungry. He wondered if Ron would understand if he scraped the table with a claw and stared pointedly at him.

A flash of color caught his eye, and he turned his head. The Healer was holding out a cluster of bright seed in her hand. She put it on the table, and Harry began to peck busily at it. He supposed it was a reasonable compromise between human and peacock food.

Ron made a quiet sound of amusement, but he wasn’t trying to interrogate Harry or take away the food at the moment. Harry could ignore him.

He hadn’t finished, although the Healer had left, when the door opened again, and Kingsley and Calzade came in. Harry tried to stand to attention, found his tail spreading, and snapped it shut again with an irritated click of his beak.

Kingsley stood back near the door, while Calzade came towards him slowly, staring. Then he shook his head. “Only you, Potter.”

 _Yes, I’ve heard quite enough of that, thanks._ Harry again stared, and Calzade seemed to get the point. He nodded. “Fine, to business. We investigated the wards on Malfoy Manor, and found them exactly as Malfoy had said we would, with an exception for a large group of people not related to the Malfoys by blood, and a spell that can turn unwanted intruders into peacocks.” He sighed and took a chair next to the table. “The main problem is that we found no means of undoing the spell that’s trapped you.”

Harry would have banged his head against the table if he was human. As it was, he only stalked back and forth, and took some joy in watching his claws cut grooves in the slick top of the table.

“But that doesn’t mean we can’t find one,” Calzade added hastily, as if he wanted to save the table. “Auror Weasley has suggested contacting his wife. I understand that she does magical research? Although mostly into house-elves.”

“Her research includes some ideas about how house-elves are bound to their owners and the owners’ properties,” Ron cut in. “I thought she might understand how a ward around an old home could do this.”

“Well, as Mr. Malfoy says, it was probably his father’s fault. But we can certainly try.” Calzade shrugged and gave Harry a rueful smile. “Until we find a way, you’ll be on leave, Auror Potter. Do try not to get in any more trouble on the way home.”

“Here, you can’t expect Harry to stay by himself!” Ron sat up. “He can’t open doors or do anything else like that when he’s a peacock!”

Calzade and Kingsley exchanged glances. “Well, that’s true,” said Calzade. “Not something I’d thought of. But we do need you here to work on this case, Auror Weasley, especially since the…last time when Researcher Granger-Weasley worked with the team.”

“Hermione does _not_ need a monitor.”

“Then say that some of our other Aurors do. And a buffer.”

Ron rolled his eyes and muttered, but Harry knew he would agree. Hermione had nearly caused a lot of problems between the Auror Department and several others in the Ministry the last time she had helped Ron on a case. “Fine. Then what would you suggest Harry do?”

Harry shrieked to get their attention—it was a more impressive shriek in a confined room like this than he’d realized—and then reached out and pecked the table. When they only stared at him in confusion, he flung his wings wide and pointed around at the walls.

“You want to stay here in the Ministry?”

Harry bobbed his head emphatically at Calzade. There was no better place for him, he thought, especially if Hermione was going to be coming _here_. And that way, he was on hand if someone tried to start making trouble for Draco, which Harry was afraid they would the instant they realized that Draco didn’t actually know a lot about the smugglers.

“Well, it’s not a terrible idea,” said Kingsley quietly. “Why not? As long as he has food and a place for him to rest at night, and perhaps by then Researcher Granger-Weasley will have completed her business and he can go home with his friends.”

Calzade nodded. “It’s not as though there are regulations that cover situations like this, not really,” he said, with a sudden smile. “All right, Auror Potter. Consider yourself wounded on duty and confined to the office.”

Harry only bobbed his head again, and leaped off the table to lead the way out of the room. He wanted to find Draco’s interrogation room and make sure they were treating him right. And if Draco _did_ come up with any ideas to undo Lucius’s spell, Harry wanted to be one of the first to hear them.

_And if we’ve got some time alone…_

_Well, I don’t wound myself for just anyone. He probably wants to talk._


	5. Adventures Whether One Wants Them Or Not

It didn’t take that long to find Draco’s interrogation room. Harry didn’t know if he would say that his hearing was _better_ , but he could hear things he hadn’t noticed before. That meant he could hear Draco’s monotone replies to Auror questions even before he got near the door.

He lifted his head and screeched at Ron, who had followed him. Ron rolled his eyes and opened the door. “I hope you understand how ridiculous this is,” he said.

Harry strutted in without bothering to reply. He basically had to strut anyway, to keep his stupid tail off the ground. He had a lot more sympathy for peacocks and the proud way they walked than he’d ever had before.

_Not that I thought much about peacocks before._

The inhabitants of the room looked up when he and Ron came in. Harry didn’t think it was his imagination that Draco smiled, although he wiped the expression off so fast that it felt that way. Harry came over and jumped up on the table, aiming so that he didn’t scatter the notes Auror Hazan was taking.

“Yes? Did you want something?” Auror Hazan was one of those people who weren’t really fans of Harry’s, because he always felt that _he_ would have been the best Auror around if Harry hadn’t existed. But now, his brown eyes were alight as he watched Harry’s tail and wings and beak. Well, Harry honestly couldn’t blame him for that.

He turned his tail, though, and faced Draco, cocking his head. Draco paused for a second as if he was waiting for words even though Harry couldn’t speak, and then reached out and stroked the plume on top of Harry’s head.

Harry hadn’t known how _good_ that would feel. He’d once been Transfigured into a cat as part of Auror training, to see how long it took them before animal instincts started to impose on their human minds, and not even being petted on the head had felt like this. He tilted his head so Draco could reach the plume more easily and stalked a step towards him.

“As entertaining as this is,” said Hazan in a strangled voice, “is Auror Peacock here for a reason?”

“He wants to know more about Malfoy’s suspicions of smugglers on his grounds,” said Ron, covering for the fact that Harry couldn’t tell him why he wanted to be here pretty glibly. Harry would have to tell him, when he could, how glib he found it. “He knows Malfoy’s innocent, but he thinks…”

The words faded before the strokes of Draco’s knuckles. Harry barely controlled the impulse to spread his tail and dance in front of Draco. He deserved some sort of acknowledgment for how good he was at this.

_Maybe he knows how to pet a peacock because he’s petted plenty of them in the past._

And that thought, ridiculous as it was, made Harry want to bugle in outrage and go back to the Manor grounds and fight a few of those birds who had been birds their whole lives. No one but him deserved to have Draco touch them like this. Only him.

Harry paused, and snapped his eyes open. Draco’s hand continued moving, bringing bliss into Harry’s life, but Harry noticed it slowed down, as if Draco had caught some of the thoughts that were running through his mind.

Peacock thoughts. They had to be. Harry had spent far longer as a peacock than he ever had as a Transfigured animal in the training sessions, and that had to mean he was starting to think the way a bird would. Even spreading his tail and strutting around was a peacock way of trying to impress a mate.

_Not that it makes much sense why I’m thinking about taking a human as a mate, if I think like a peacock._

Harry gave his head a shake and backed away from Draco’s hand. Ron was explaining something to Hazan about the smugglers and how long they’d been chasing him which made the other Auror’s face twist up. He cast Draco a look of dislike.

Harry hissed. The other Aurors blinked at him. Draco’s face was blank.

“Mate?” Ron asked cautiously. “What’s going on?”

 _What’s going on is that I’m being a right idiot who’s succumbing to my instincts. Hermione can’t fix this soon enough._ Harry gave his tail as brisk a shake as he had his head, and then leaped off to the table and moved to the door.

“Going to leave us to conduct the investigation the way we’re _supposed_ to, Potter?”

If Harry stayed, he would only make a fool of himself, and probably make things worse for Draco. He strutted away as if Hazan’s opinion wasn’t any concern to him, and waited for Ron to shut the door, before he started down the corridor towards their office.

“What was _that_ , mate?”

Harry wondered in exasperation why Ron kept asking him questions he couldn’t answer. He cocked his head at himself, and Ron nodded, his face lightening.

“Right, your body is driving you to behave in ways that you never would with a human.”

 _That I wouldn’t do that openly if I was a human, no._ And as Harry went on parading down the corridor, he had to wonder how much he needed to think about before he had a conversation with Draco.

A conversation that would go better if they were alone, anyway.

*

The Aurors hadn’t treated him badly, Draco had to admit, even though they also hadn’t let him go home yet. They said they had to investigate the Manor and exactly where the smugglers were hiding, first. They’d treated his descriptions of the shut-up wing and rooms as likely possibilities but not knowledge.

_Well, technically I can’t show too much knowledge, or I’ll undo all the problems that Harry tried to spare me from._

They had brought him a fairly substantial meal, with eggs and toast and sausage, as if it was morning, and Draco had eaten slowly and carefully, as much to fend off the questioning beginning again as for any other reason. The Aurors had watched him impatiently across the table, but aside from muttering and stirring, hadn’t done anything objectionable. Draco patted his mouth clean with the provided napkin and turned back to their questions.

He had thought of one thing that would make this interrogation more tolerable, however, and he put the plan into motion before the brown-eyed Auror who didn’t like him could start reading from his script again.

“I do not know how to reverse the spell that trapped Auror Potter,” he said. “My father most likely cast it without my knowledge.”

“We’d established that already from the questions you answered, Malfoy,” snapped Hazan, leaning forwards a little. “Is there some _reason_ that you’re bringing it up again?”

“Yes, actually,” Draco said, and patiently ignored the way Hazan’s eyes narrowed. “I wanted to know whether I could visit my father in Azkaban, to question him on the best way to reverse the spell.”

“Why would we do _that_?”

Draco shrugged a little. “I haven’t been granted permission to visit my father since his arrest. But from what I understand, the Aurors and Healers who _have_ tried to question him haven’t had much luck. He’s retreated into absolute silence and won’t even open his mouth or look at them most of the time. Right?”

There were glances sliding between the Aurors that told Draco his information was correct. He held his reaction tightly inwards. His relationship with his father was…complex, and not something these Aurors needed to be privy to.

“Yes,” the other Auror who was working with Hazan said, finally, sounding a little reluctant. “He doesn’t even scream when the Dementors pass by, and every other prisoner in Azkaban does that. It’s unnatural.”

Draco only nodded. “It might be that he hasn’t seen anyone he deems worth responding to since his arrest. It might also be that he has some magical means of resisting the Dementors. But I’m sure that I would at least get a reaction out of him. And he might be willing to tell me about this spell. He meant it to protect me, I’m sure. Not get me in further trouble by trapping an Auror of Potter’s status.”

“Why should we reward you when you’re the suspect?” Hazan demanded.

Luckily, Draco knew how to handle _this_ kind of hostility. He leaned back in his chair and met Hazan’s eyes, holding them and smiling slightly, until the Auror turned away. Only then he did he speak. “Did you think I would forget my status if you didn’t mention it for a while?” he asked calmly. “I know that I’m not a suspect. I alerted you to the presence of smugglers in my house once I knew about them. You can’t treat me as if I had done something suspicious when you haven’t even bothered to arrest me.”

Hazan tried to exchange a frustrated glance with the other Auror, but that Auror smiled at Draco instead, in a way that made him think he wasn’t the only one who found Hazan frustrating. “True enough. And if you can’t think of any other way to get information…”

“I can’t,” Draco said, shrugging. “I’ll grant you permission to set traps for the smugglers on my property, of course. Even my friends aren’t true friends of mine if they were willingly aiding them without my knowledge. But to solve the problem of Auror Potter being trapped in a peacock’s form, the only solution I can think of is going to Azkaban and asking my father.”

“I’ll escort you.”

“Jamie! If you really think that it’s a good idea to bring one Malfoy into contact with another—”

“I think it’s a good idea to find solutions, instead of indulging your paranoia,” said Jamie crisply, standing up. He was a taller man than Hazan, and for a few seconds, he smiled down at him, using the advantage. “I’m sure I can handle it if someone not even trained in the Dark Arts tries to turn on me. And that in front of the Dementors and Azkaban prisoners who don’t even have wands to help.”

“How do _you_ know he’s not trained in the Dark Arts? If you think about how little he’s told us about his friends—”

“Unlike you, I sometimes read reports other than the ones for the case right in front of me,” said Jamie, and rolled his eyes at Hazan, then turned his back to extend his hand to Draco. “If you’re ready for the cold of Azkaban, we can leave. If not, then I think I should cast some Warming Charms on you first. I can perform a Patronus.”

Draco actually wondered for a second if Hazan, who looked so frustrated, was about to stab this Jamie in the back, but nothing happened. He only slumped back with a grumble of defeat and a glare so wicked that Draco flinched a little from it, as he would from feeling a dagger pressing against his throat. Then he shook his head. Hazan wouldn’t get away with harming either Draco or a fellow Auror, and he seemed to know that.

“Thank you,” Draco said, and stood still while Jamie cast the charms on him. He knew better than to ask for his own wand. They trusted him, but not that far, and the wands of everyone in this section of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement got confiscated unless they were actually Aurors.

“You won’t find anything out,” Hazan snapped in a low voice as Draco and Jamie walked towards the door. “He’s as Dark as his wretched father.”

“Thank you for the input, Hazan,” said Jamie, and shut the door behind them with a firmness that made Draco blink, and then grin.

“You don’t like him, either?” Draco dared to ask as they walked down the corridor.

Jamie rolled his eyes. “Not many people do. He makes snap judgments and then won’t reverse them—which might not be a bad thing, but we have to be flexible in judging criminals and suspects. We try to make sure that we only bring in those we have a strong reason to think are guilty, but it’s not like _that_ always works, is it? Hazan refused to testify in a trial last year because it turned out we arrested the wrong witch for the crime, and he wouldn’t say that the second one we found was guilty. Even though she confessed under Veritaserum.”

Draco snorted before he could stop himself. “He sounds difficult to work with,” he said quickly when Jamie raised an eyebrow at him.

“Yes, he is,” said Jamie, and then opened a door that had lifts right outside it and escorted Draco to the nearest one. “Now. About Azkaban. You’re _sure_ that you want to go there?”

“I think I have to.” Draco eyed the man for a second. “Unless you have some other way to uncover the truth about the possible spell that entrapped—Auror Potter?” It was a struggle not to simply say “Potter.”

“It’s your funeral around Dementors, Malfoy,” said Jamie with a small shrug, and they made their way out of the Ministry.

*

“Is it comfortable, mate?”

Harry raised his head and bobbed it down very obviously so that Ron would accept the answer. He had created a bed of shredded newspaper on the floor next to his desk, and Harry appreciated both the effort he’d gone to in ripping up all those _Daily Prophets_ and that it was the _Prophet_ he’d chosen to rip off. Harry had to admit he would feel better about shitting on some gossip about Celestina Warbeck or similar than an article Luna had written.

But Ron kept giving him concerned looks, and sometimes standing up and then sitting down again with a frown as if he assumed that Harry would suddenly demand gourmet worms, or something.

Honestly, what looked most appealing was the cheese sandwich on Ron’s desk. Harry caught his eye and jerked his beak towards it.

“You want my _sandwich_?” Ron sounded a little shocked. Then he frowned and shook his head. “I don’t think that’s healthy for peacocks, mate.”

Harry wanted to tell him, so badly, that he’d taken a huge hunk of pork from the kitchen in Malfoy Manor and eaten _that_ and it had done him no harm. But he had the feeling that wasn’t going to work. He settled for raking his foot hard through the flurry of newspaper and sending scraps fluttering up all around them.

“All _right_ , all _right_ ,” Ron said, and rolled his eyes as he broke off a corner of the cheese sandwich and flung it at Harry. He grinned then. “I’d have probably ended up giving it to you anyway. It’s not like I have any idea what that fancy food the Healer gave you was.”

Harry gobbled down the bit of the sandwich, feeling it stretch his throat uncomfortably. He cocked his head and hoped he looked whimsical as he swallowed it.

He had suffered a sudden freezing wave of fear that he would be begging food from his friends or eating fancy bird food like the kind the Healer had offered him for the rest of his life. Always shifting and hearing torn newspaper crinkling beneath him. Always twisting his head and feeling the weight of his train dragging behind him.

_But that won’t happen. If nothing else, they’ll find a way to interview Lucius and he’ll tell them about the spell. Or Hermione will figure out a solution, and we’ll never have to ask Lucius in the first place._

Harry made an attempt to fold his head under his wing, or however peacocks did it, and found that it was harder than when he’d been perching in a tree. After he stood up several times and shifted around and made the newspaper rustle, Ron shot him an annoyed look, and Harry flopped back into stillness with a little sigh.

_I’ll have to do the best I can to deal with the consequences on my own for right now._

*

“My coward of a son.”

Draco was distantly surprised that Lucius was still sane enough to recognize him right away. He also seemed less disheveled than a lot of the other prisoners Draco had passed. _Then again,_ Draco thought, as he leaned his arm against the bars and stared his father down, _it’s harder to impact ice than flesh._

“Because I never visited you before? That’s your sign of cowardice?”

“That you never had the strength to carry on my defiance of the Aurors. I hardly doubt the one behind you dragged you here.”

Draco smiled distantly, hoping he didn’t show anything of how hard his heart was trying to pound its way out of his chest. He could _act_ casual, but his father’s words still cut and scraped him far more than anyone else’s.

“I’m here about an Auror-related matter, actually,” he drawled, and waited until Lucius turned to stare back at him. “The spell you set that turned people into peacocks? It’s caught Potter.”

Lucius flung back his head and laughed. Draco felt his skin prickle as he listened. He was accustomed to his father pausing and hesitating, using the time to think about every new move he made, and the effect it would have on people who either looked up to him or opposed him. This was a Lucius who sounded as if he had never done that.

 _Maybe Azkaban did change him after all,_ Draco had to acknowledge, as his father leaned towards the bars and smiled in a way that went deeper than lips or teeth.

“Then I am not going to tell you how to reverse it,” Lucius said triumphantly. “Potter is the one directly responsible for all we suffered. And if you choose to look on him as a friend and beg me to reverse it, then you deserve any suffering that this brings to _you_ , as well.”

Draco stood silent, watching his father. There were no longer as many Dementors around as there had been in the past. He had also known his father was firmly convinced that everything he had done was for the best. Those things working together, Draco had hoped, might spare his father’s sanity.

It was becoming obvious that had been a futile hope.

Draco did still lick his lips and try again, even though he thought the Auror behind him was probably convinced that he’d had nothing to do with this by now. “What kind of spell did you use, Father? What incantation? What book in the library? If you want me to work for the answer, that’s all I need.”

“No book,” said Lucius almost gaily. “No incantation. The magic of life, which only needs some blood and the will to survive. A spell of my own devising, made of the grounds and the slant of sunlight on an autumn day and my own laughter.” And he laughed again, doubled back against the wall of the cell by the force of his merriment.

Draco swallowed and looked at the Auror. Jamie nodded a little, his mouth drawn tight. “I don’t think there’s much to be gained by staying here.”

Draco was turning when Lucius’s hand caught his robe. Draco yanked himself away before he thought about it, his lip curling. But Lucius only stared at him with his mouth wide open and laughed again.

“You won’t free him,” he whispered. “You can’t conjure the moment when I made the spell again, and his own life’s magic will work against him, transforming him into a peacock because it wants to survive in that new body. The more time that passes, the more bird-like he will become. You might as well let him live out his life on the grounds. Let him strut and flare his tail and mate and raise eggs. It’s the only fate he’ll have.”

Draco turned and walked out of Azkaban without responding. His head and his belly pounded together with sickness and fear and fury.

Potter had saved him, had tried to give him the benefit of the doubt even though he didn’t have to, had injured himself for Draco, had lied to his best friend for him.

That deserved a better fate than being a peacock for the rest of his life, and Draco intended to provide it for him.


	6. Moments of Life

“I don’t think the spell would have affected you as powerfully if not for the Elder Wand.”

Harry settled his tail with a rustle and stared at Hermione. _Well, that’s helpful._

Hermione rolled her eyes at him, exactly as if she knew what he was thinking. She probably did. She’d told him more times than Harry could remember. She knelt down next to him and reached out to touch the feather on his tail where the silhouette of the Elder Wand shone.

“The Wand tried to fight the spell, I think,” she said quietly. “The force of death against life came to a standstill, and that’s why you’re trapped the way you are. Anyone else would probably have become a peacock in brain at once, and we would never have known what happened to them.” She shook her head. “Why _do_ Dark wizards play around with magic like that?”

“Um,” Ron said, lounging against his desk and watching Hermione as she crouched in the newspaper. “Because they’re Dark wizards?”

“Yes, thank you for your contribution,” Hermione told him dryly. “In the meantime, do you have the _slightest idea_ how to get Harry out of this form?”

“Nope,” Ron said.

He sounded cheerful on the surface, but when Harry looked at him, he could see the way that Ron’s eyes had tightened and his hands clasped his wand. Harry extended his neck and touched Ron with his beak as gently as he could. Ron started and then looked at him again, dropping his tight hold on his wand with a little smile.

“I’m all right, mate,” he said soothingly, reaching out to tickle Harry’s neck feathers with one hand. “Just a little jumpy.”

Harry turned his head to the side and crooned in response. Ron nodded and looked to Hermione.

“So Harry’s lucky in that he’s been spared what the spell’s meant to do. What can we do to get it _un_ done? What kind of magic do you think can help someone when the Elder Wand’s involved?”

“If I had known this before, I might have been able to tell you.”

Not even Harry had heard Draco coming up to the door, and he’d thought it would be hard for him to miss. He controlled the impulse to fan his tail out, and merely inclined his head. Hermione jumped and then looked annoyed at herself for doing so. Ron only looked as polite and narrow-eyed as he always had around Malfoys since the end of the war.

“I’ve visited my father,” Draco said, stepping into the office and taking the chair that normally would have been Harry’s. He spoke to Ron and Hermione, Harry thought, because they were the only ones who could answer him, but he really _hadn’t_ removed his eyes from Harry so far. “He seems to think that no one can undo the spell unless they can recreate the moment when he cast it.”

“What moment was that?”

“The morning that the Aurors came to take him away.” Draco sighed and bowed his head. “I told him it was about Potter because I thought that would make him eager to help. At least, that way, I would have more of a chance to escape from the Aurors’ custody. But he only laughed and refused to help.”

He continued to stare intently at Harry a moment later. Harry wished he had lips and a human voice. _I could have told him that the one time I went to see Lucius in Azkaban, he was too mad to help anyone._

But that would mean revealing he had gone to see Lucius in Azkaban, and why—something Draco might consider an intrusion into his privacy, anyway. So perhaps it was good that he didn’t have his voice.

“The Elder Wand changes things, though.” Draco’s voice altered slightly, but Harry could only hear the alteration, not what it meant. “So the rumors are true and you’re the Master of Death?”

Harry waited, but neither Ron nor Hermione seemed inclined to say anything. So he bobbed his head.

“What did you use to break into the Manor? How did you get caught by Father’s spell in the first place? I’d think the Master of Death would be strong enough to avoid getting caught by such a _simple_ trap.”

Harry wanted to flail around with his feet and scratch out angry traces, but he couldn’t get his answer across that way. And still Draco spoke with his eyes fixed on Harry’s, as if he assumed that would be the best method of making Harry understand him.

_He’s speaking to me. Not Ron and Hermione._

Maybe in this case, it would help if Harry tried to translate. He faced Hermione, waited until she extended a hand, and then reached out and tapped his beak softly in the center. She flinched but didn’t withdraw. Harry stirred his foot through the newspaper again and tried to mimic, as best he could, placing a wand in someone’s palm.

“Oh, of course!” Hermione nodded and turned to Draco. “Harry does still use his holly wand most of the time. He only summons the Elder Wand when he has to do something like, well, break into a guarded house.”

“I thought that was so.” Draco hadn’t taken his eyes from Harry, which was flattering in one way and _immensely creepy_ in another.

“When he does break in, he uses it,” Hermione said, and paused to look at Harry. Harry bobbed his head in response. The one thing he was absolutely certain of was that Draco wouldn’t try to use the information to go after him. “He uses it to take him to something dead. He can always bridge the distance between him and the place he wants to go that way. He’d probably have appeared in your grounds, where some small animal had died.”

Harry bobbed his head again, and clapped his wings for emphasis. Draco leaned slowly back in his chair. “Then the Elder Wand is protecting you. Preserving your sanity against the encroachment of my father’s spell.”

Harry couldn’t understand why the information seemed to depress Draco. He nodded again.

“Fine,” Draco said, with a long, drawn-out sigh. “Now, how do you suggest we go about reversing the transformation? It must be impossible to recreate the exact conditions of the day that he cast the spell on.”

“Do we know that?” Hermione was already digging into a book she’d gone to her home library to bring back. “There are such things as imitating the slant of light—the kind of time magic that’s not concerned with time travel, you know—”

“I don’t trust my father,” Draco said, his voice thick and spreading like leaf mold. “I’m sure that he left something out, something he didn’t want to tell me. That means we could do everything right and still not get the spell correct. Or we would do it, and there would be some trapped contingency spell that means Potter would be harmed again.”

He turned his head slightly, as if he wanted to shut Hermione entirely out of his line of vision, and stared at Harry. “I don’t want that to happen.”

Harry couldn’t describe how heavily his heart beat. But he did know it was more like a human’s than a bird’s. He leaned forwards and gently nibbled at Draco’s fingers. He couldn’t do anything else.

“But of course we can compensate for that.” Hermione’s head popped up from her book again. “Harry has the Elder Wand, doesn’t he?”

“He does,” Draco said, in an unencouraging tone. “But it seems all it’s done so far is make it possible for him to resist the spell a little, not free himself.”

“That’s because Harry hasn’t committed himself fully to it.”

Draco snapped his head around, his eyes locked again on Harry. Harry wondered what it was for this time. Hermione's words were true and the right ones for the situation. Harry wasn't about to contradict her.

"What do you mean, _hasn't committed himself fully to it?_ "

"Well." At least Hermione looked as startled at Draco's sudden mood change as Harry felt. "I mean, he doesn't want to be the Master of Death. So he continues to use his holly wand and only uses the Elder one when he wants to get in somewhere or defeat a really powerful enemy. I did tell you about the holly one," she added, probably just to emphasize it.

Draco knelt down in front of Harry and shook his head. His fingers were lightly trembling, and he seemed to be caught somewhere between shock and anger. "You don't want to be the Master of Death."

Even though it didn't sound like a question, Harry shook his head emphatically.

"Why?"

Again it felt as though this was a private conversation, just between the two of them. But Draco had again forgotten that Harry couldn't speak in answer to complicated questions. Harry looked at Hermione.

Draco interrupted her before she could even begin. "Oh, I'm sorry. Let me guess and you can nod or shake your head, all right?"

Harry nodded, cautiously. There was still something off about Draco's response to the situation, and he wasn't sure what it was.

"Let's see." Draco tapped a finger against his lips, his voice light and mocking. "You don't want to have a wand made of elder wood instead of holly wood?"

Harry shook his head, scowling. He was afraid it didn't come across as an intimidating expression when he was a peacock, and sure enough, Draco just lifted an eyebrow before he continued on.

"You don't want to use the wand that Dumbledore did?"

Harry honestly had to think about it, but in the end, he shook his head again. That maybe had been part of the answer once upon a time, but it wasn't now. Dumbledore was dead, and Harry had made his peace with his shade.

"You don't want to have the power?"

 _He knew that was the answer all along,_ Harry suddenly realized, and again tried to scowl at the expression on Draco's face. _Why did he even bother trying the others?_ But Harry nodded anyway, because it was true.

"You're ridiculous." Draco leaned even further towards him, so Harry couldn't see Ron or Hermione past his head, and spoke with fervent passion. "You are utterly and completely ridiculous. Do you realize that?"

Harry shook his head again, and wished he dared leap up and try to spur Draco.

*

Draco wanted to squeeze Harry, or shake him. Unfortunately, at the moment that would probably mean damaging his fragile feathers and neck, so instead Draco tried to settle for glaring as much as possible.

Harry only glared back.

_He never has wanted power, and look where it's got him now!_

Intellectually, Draco could understand why someone wouldn't want power. Harry had had enough examples of someone fucking it up. Voldemort, Dumbledore (well, Draco thought that, at least), Death Eaters, Ministry officials and even Ministers who thought they knew best...

But it was different, Draco was convinced, when it was your _own_ power. Harry wouldn't commit the stupidities with it that the Dark Lord or the Ministers had in the past, especially since he wasn't interested in leading a revolution or running for office. And Draco thought there was an easy-to-see difference between political power and magical power.

Harry could have kept magical power to himself all he wanted. No one except his friends had to know he was the Master of Death. He could have conducted experiments with the Hallows or tried to master the Resurrection Stone or just gone into esoteric theory in an attempt to understand his own gifts.

Instead, he'd lived this kind of half-life where the Elder Wand was apparently mainly important for helping him in his _job._ And he'd never expected the wand to retaliate against his disrespect?

Draco had to wonder if a tendency towards heroic sacrifice also killed brain cells.

"You have to commit yourself fully," he said. "The Wand has the power to rescue you from this, but the tales are clear. It's proud and it's jealous. It's never been someone's _second_ choice. It's probably protecting your mind and preventing you from being rescued from the spell at the same time."

"But you said it wouldn't be easy to reverse the spell, Malfoy," Granger immediately protested. "What do you mean?"

"Yeah, what does that mean?" Weasley chimed in.

Draco only kept looking at Harry, who lowered his eyes and dragged his tail a little on the floorboards. _He_ knew.

"I've read more stories about the Elder Wand than you have," Draco said calmly. "There have always been more tales about it than the other Deathly Hallows, anyway, and I know some of my ancestors believed that it existed when they didn't believe in the Invisibility Cloak or the Resurrection Stone. _Some_ wand has to be the most powerful, right? Well, it can save its wielder from any spell. Even the Killing Curse, apparently. It rarely did because it rarely wanted to stay with any one wizard long enough, but now it's chosen a master. It stands to reason that it would get Harry out of this if he only stopped acting like a martyr long enough to see the advantages of having an unbeatable wand."

"Harry's not acting like a _martyr_ , he's acting sensible! Everyone would want to murder him if they knew he was carrying the Deathstick--"

Draco held up his hand to stem Weasley's tirade. "He could keep it just between the people in this office, and then no one would know. I think most people already have dismissed the whole idea that he could be the Master of Death from their minds. But if you go about blurting it out all over the place, Weasley..."

Weasley looked properly abashed, which was the only thing that satisfied Draco about this situation at the moment. Harry still wouldn't look at him.

“You know as well as I do that you won’t misuse that power,” Draco said, low and intense. “And you’ve already thought that this is a possible way of overcoming my father’s spell. I know you have. What is a spell compared to being the Master of Death?”

Harry’s head twitched a little, but Draco couldn’t tell at which part of what he had said. He remained silent and continued to will Harry to look at him. Only then would he know what was really going through his head.

_Peacock or not._

*

_He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t know me the way I know myself._

And Harry knew he wasn’t perfect. He was rash. He charged into things without thinking enough about them—not as much as he had when he was a teenager, but it still happened sometimes. The last thing he thought the Master of Death should be was impulsive.

People could sometimes hold onto power without being corrupted by it. Harry thought Dumbledore hadn’t been corrupted by the Elder Wand, but he had been tempted by the Resurrection Stone, and look at what had happened with _that_. Harry might end up only hurting himself. Still, Ron and Hermione had long ago made him understand that hurting himself hurt them, too.

No. It wasn’t possible, for reasons that Draco didn’t think were legitimate but also ones that he didn’t know enough about Harry to consider.

“Harry.”

It felt different when Draco called him by his name than when his friends did it. Harry didn’t know why, but he thought about how good Draco’s touch on the top of his head had felt earlier, and the urge he had to puff out his tail and fight other peacocks for access to Draco, and there was a stirring of alarm in the bottom of his feet.

“Leave, Granger, Weasley.”

“If you’re going to try and hurt him—”

“No. I only want to speak about something private, and see if that argument convinces him where my others didn’t.”

Harry cringed a little. He didn’t want to listen to Draco, because he might be too convincing.

But Hermione must somehow have convinced Ron it was necessary. Harry heard the thump of their footsteps as they left, and then Draco crouched down in front of him and gently took hold of his neck, turning Harry’s head back whether or not he wanted it to be.

“You need to listen to me,” Draco breathed. “Are you listening?”

Harry moved his head in sulky assent.

“We need to have a conversation about why you wounded yourself for me.” Draco stared at him with glinting eyes that were suddenly wildly hard to look away from. “I think you know it as well as I do, and maybe you even intended to talk to me when you came into the interrogation room earlier. But we couldn’t do that when the other Aurors were there.” His voice abruptly sharpened. “And we can’t do it while you’re a peacock. I _refuse_ to ask simple questions when I could hear your human voice answering the complex ones.

“Get back into your human form, Harry bloody Potter. And if you’re really worried about being corrupted by the power of being Master of Death, then I’ll stand by you and help you in that battle.”

Harry let out a soft chirp and permitted his tail to fan out. Draco didn’t react to that, except to continue watching him.

Harry closed his eyes. He had always known acceptance of the Elder Wand would be simple. He had to admit, he had never imagined accepting it for precisely this _reason_ , but needs must.

The wand was waiting for him, a source of power he had always avoided, like a hole in the middle of the floor that he was always stepping around. The magic shimmered, reached out, and clasped him like a handshake.

Then there was a stirring, a falling, a fading. Harry felt as if he was becoming bigger but tumbling down a long tunnel, so it was _like_ being smaller. He stretched out, and felt that he had more digits, and no feathers, and his Auror robes were slimy with sweat and unwashed skin.

He blinked his eyes open. He was kneeling in front of Draco, at least not naked, and Draco was giving him a hard smile.

“Good,” Draco breathed, and with a flourish of his wand, locked the door. To Harry’s stare, he settled back, and said, “Let’s talk.”


	7. Second Chances

“I want you to tell me why you wounded yourself for me.”

Harry had thought Draco would start with a harder question. Or one that he was less likely to know the answer to. He blinked, sat down in Ron’s chair, and stretched his legs out. It felt good. “Because I knew the Aurors already suspected you and I didn’t want you to get into trouble for making me ‘disappear.’ I couldn’t tell them the truth in peacock form, either. So I did something that would make them too concerned for me to question you.”

Draco ran a hand down his face. He looked as tired as though he’d had to perform some huge spell to help Harry out of peacock form after all. “But you could have thought of something else.”

“Maybe with more time. But they were _right there_ , and I didn’t have the time.”

Draco stood up and paced back and forth in front of the desk for a moment. “But you didn’t have to wound yourself for me.”

“That was the only plan I could think of.” Harry hesitated, but in the end, he had to say it. “I think you’re putting more weight on this than it really deserves.”

Draco spun on one heel so fast that his cloak flew behind him, and stormed towards Harry. “Oh, I am, am I?” He laid his hands on the arms of Harry’s chair and leaned in. “Tell me why that’s _so_.”

Harry swallowed. There was an electric charge crackling between them, and it was—strange. “Because I believed you were innocent. I _knew_ you were innocent. And it was partially my fault that I was trapped. I should have been more careful. I did this to correct my mistake and keep you safe.”

“So you would do it for other people, is what you’re saying.”

“Any innocent person I unwittingly got in trouble, yes.”

Draco gave a slow smile, one that curled up his lips in such a predatory fashion Harry couldn’t help shivering. Draco noticed and looked for a long moment at Harry’s collarbone. Harry thought he was deliberately keeping his eyes from dropping further. “And how often does that happen?”

Harry had to think. Honestly, he could only remember his first incident in the field, when he’d got fooled by a Ventriloquism Charm and chased down an innocent woman instead of the right criminal. She’d only run because he was running at her. “One of the thieves I was helping Dawlish track. She threw her voice, made it sound like it was coming from the mouth of someone else, and we nearly arrested that woman before she could convince us it wasn’t her.” That they hadn’t _seen_ the thief without glamours was a large component of that particular mistake.

“But you didn’t wound yourself for her.”

“No. But I did offer her my sincerest apologies, and a lot of Galleons.” In the end, the woman had taken his autograph instead. A lot of her horror and outrage had disappeared when she realized he was _Harry Potter._ To Harry’s disgust, that wasn’t the only time he’d been forgiven a mistake because of his name, although it was his worst one.

“It’s still not the same,” Draco said, his voice as soft as ribbons. His hand rose and came to rest for a second on Harry’s cheek, and then he stepped away but still stood so that Harry couldn’t have risen out of his chair. “You did something incredibly risky for me. You could have died. You had a lot less blood to lose in peacock form.”

“The Elder Wand would have protected me.”

“When you refused to accept it?”

“It wouldn’t have let me die.”

“Wouldn’t it?”

Harry paused. He had to admit he didn’t really know, which was probably the main thing Draco was trying to make him admit. He sighed and ducked his head.

“You don’t have to worry about what this means for me, which it sounds like you’re doing.” A small edge crept into Draco’s voice, contrasting utterly with the soft way he touched Harry’s cheek. “I know you believed I was innocent and you took a risk for me. I want to talk about why you paid that risk in blood. And I want you to be honest, not try to excuse yourself. Or me, because you think it might upset me.”

Harry raised his head. Some of these things he had said to other Aurors, he reasoned. He could say them to Draco. They shouldn’t terrify him.

It was the other words, the ones he had never spoken, that did.

“I was sure you were innocent from the moment I heard about the smugglers going to Malfoy Manor,” he said. “I never—I thought you had more _potential_ than that. And more sense. No way were you going to do something that stupid after the war.”

Draco’s lips twitched a little, and he said, “I think you might overestimate Malfoy common sense. But thank you for doing so in a way that’s so favorable to me.” He hesitated, then added, “I’m still waiting.”

“If you were guilty,” Harry said, “the Aurors would arrest you. And everyone else was obviously already convinced that you at least knew about it. I wanted to investigate myself to give you a fair chance.”

“Yes.”

“And I—I wondered what else you could become if you just had a chance,” Harry whispered. Here were the terrifying words he had only dared think in his bed at night, as if even being in the same room with someone else, or in the light, might illuminate them on his chest in blazing letters. “I thought that maybe, someday, when you’d had years to grow past the war and learn to settle into yourself, I could. Maybe talk to you. Maybe see if you wanted…”

“Yes?”

At least it was a question this time. Harry raised his eyes and made sure that he was looking into Draco’s face when he spoke next, because Draco didn’t deserve to have Harry’s cowardice get in the way of hearing something good about himself. “Maybe see if you wanted to go out with me.”

Draco studied him with a careful, grave face. When he smiled, it wasn’t mocking. “On a date?”

Harry nodded. “It was…kind of a fantasy. Because you were someone I testified for, but not someone I tried to redeem, obviously. Someone I thought should have the chance to recover himself, without interference.”

“You thought I needed redemption?”

“Not from the war. From yourself. I saw your face at the trials. Don’t tell me that you forgave yourself that quickly for all the mistakes you made.”

Draco frowned slightly. “I barely knew what I was feeling at the time. How could you know that? Or decide that?”

“I just thought that was the way it was.” Harry shrugged a little. “Like I said, I was going to let some years go by, and then ask you. If you didn’t want to, then I would have moved on. But it would all have been for nothing, if you were arrested for something you didn’t do. The waiting, I mean.”

“It’s been years now.”

Harry blinked and looked up. Draco had gone back to standing in front of him, staring down at him. But it didn’t seem as intimidating this time.

Slowly, Harry stood up. He stumbled a little—his legs were so much longer as a human than they’d been as a peacock—and Draco reached out and steadied him, his hand heavy and warm on Harry’s arm.

_He hasn’t told me to fuck off yet. Maybe that’s a good sign._

Harry swallowed and said, “Thank you for your help. I wouldn’t have wanted to be a peacock forever.”

“Even if I didn’t learn about the Elder Wand just then, I would have eventually. I would have found a way.” Draco hesitated a little. “And part of it was about foiling my father. I couldn’t believe he would do something that would expose our family to harm like that, and then _brag_ about it.”

“I think he’s gone truly mad in Azkaban. He might even have been mad at the time of the trials, once he realized that he never was going to get back to what he used to be.”

“You _visited_ him?”

Harry felt himself flush. He had been thinking earlier that that was one thing he shouldn’t tell Draco, and now…but he nodded. It was out. “Yes.”

“Why?” Draco was examining Harry as if the truth might be written on his teeth, or his lips, or some other easily visible part of him.

 _Please let him try to see if it’s written on my lips._ But Harry bit his tongue against the impulse to see that. “I wanted to see if he knew anything that would—well, that would make people stop looking at you so suspiciously. That was before the smugglers’ case began and we traced them to Malfoy Manor. But there were rumors circulating about you anyway. If he could lay some of them to rest, or if he was willing to take the blame for some of the wilder ones on himself, I thought it might spare you.”

Draco blinked slowly. “You wanted to get my father in _more_ trouble?”

“They wouldn’t extend his sentence for rumors.”

Draco shook his head slowly, but Harry thought it was in wonder, not in anger. “How far gone on me _are_ you, Potter?”

Harry flushed heavily this time. There was no way Draco didn’t notice. But he only continued to examine Harry with one eyebrow raised, not looking particularly upset. Harry swallowed and answered. “I was more gone on your potential.”

“Explain that.”

“You’re almost the only former Death Eater I thought stood some real chance of living a normal life after the trials,” Harry said in a low voice, his mind full of the people he’d testified for—and against. Greyback, snarling and lunging against his chains even in the middle of the courtroom before the full Wizengamot. Rabastan Lestrange, who hadn’t spoken a word since the death of his brother in a skirmish with the Aurors. Theodore Nott’s father, who had spent the entire time staring at Harry as if he could murder him with his eyes. And he had even been _freed_ , since they’d already tried him for his crimes in the first war and during the second one he hadn’t actually done anything. But Harry had known, watching him walk from the courtroom, that he wouldn’t do anything new, wouldn’t make anything of his life. And not because of the weight of society’s turning its back on him.

“A normal life? A life a Gryffindor approves of?”

Harry gave Draco a slow, disgusted glance, in part to watch him flush. Then Harry rolled his eyes and relented. “Of course not. A life where you had what you wanted. Where you wouldn’t be suspected every time a crime happened. If you wanted to join society again, you could. You could work in the Ministry or get married and have kids or buy the hugest peacock flock you ever saw and turn them loose on your grounds. I wanted you to _live_ , Malfoy.”

“You mumbled the part about me getting married and having kids.”

Harry struggled with himself for a second, then admitted, “I hated the idea of it. But I wanted you to do what _you_ wanted. And at the time, I thought you’d probably want to get married if only to have children and watch your family grow again.”

Draco was silent for a long, thoughtful moment. Harry waited. He’d given up on trying to predict what Draco’s response would be. So far, nothing had really gone the way he thought it would.

*

_He saw that potential in me, and he fought to protect it._

Draco had thought it would be patronizing when he first heard of it, but it honestly wouldn’t. Harry had done something Draco could imagine few people in the world doing. And over and over again.

Given Draco a second chance. Refused to believe he was guilty even when all the signs seemed to point that way. Stood up against the pressure of the Aurors—and maybe his friends—to think that Malfoys were just no good. Visited his father in prison. Returned his wand. Fancied him and yet maintained a distance because he wanted Draco free to choose his own destiny.

Slowly, Draco studied Harry from head to foot. He wasn’t really looking at the lean lines of his muscles, though, despite the way Harry flushed again. He was looking for outer confirmation of what he already knew Harry had inside.

_He had the strength to help me and fight for me and yet stand aside. He would stand aside even now if I told him to._

“Do you know what I think about my family?” Draco finally whispered.

Harry blinked, but shook his head. “No. Sorry. I don’t. I would have said—but I don’t know now.”

Draco nodded. At least that proved Harry wasn’t going to just listen to his own perceptions and let them override reality. He would listen to Draco’s words instead, and although he would probably find them hard to accept, Draco knew he would in the end.

“I don’t like my family anymore,” Draco said. “What we became. How my father taught me all about Malfoy pride and wealth, and yet he used it to fight for _ridiculous_ things and bow down to a madman.”

“Ridiculous things?” Harry asked, his voice soft as a deer’s footsteps.

“Like getting a hippogriff executed.” Draco grimaced; he would remember his own part in that, too, although it made him flinch. “And feuding with the Weasleys. The man I thought he was never would have given an enchanted diary to a little girl that would kill her. Not because he liked the Weasleys, but because he would have been _above_ such things. And he wasn’t.”

“You didn’t seem as if you were—”

Harry stopped, but Draco laughed softly and responded, “Above such things? No, I wasn’t. But I was a _child_. What is my father’s excuse? Nothing except that he wished for certain things to happen a certain way. When he had spent my life telling me that my own desires were never a good enough reason to do something.”

There was more thickness in his voice than he had thought there would be. Harry gently reached out and touched his cheek. “And he hasn’t exactly been granting a lot of your wishes since you came of age, either.”

Draco only shook his head. He had tried, _battled_ , to avoid blaming his father for what had happened with the Dark Lord. He knew it had never been what Lucius had intended, that his son should be a slave. If nothing else, his father had valued the Malfoy family’s dignity too highly for that to happen.

But it _had_ happened, because Draco’s father had not thought he could lose, that any Dark Lord he allied with would win simply because a Malfoy had chosen him. And Draco had been Marked, and Lucius was in prison, and he had woven the peacock spell Draco had known nothing about and made things more difficult.

No, his father had ceased to think of the Malfoy family and the way his actions could affect Draco. He was too focused on the way his actions could affect _Lucius_. Even mad, Draco was sure that was true.

“So what else does that mean?”

Harry’s voice was hesitant. Draco met his eyes and looked until he saw the flash in them that indicated mild irritation. _Good. I don’t want a partner who will back down because he pities me._

“It means I’m free to choose my own fate,” Draco said. “And my father isn’t the only one who did ridiculous things.” He held Harry’s gaze until Harry ducked his head.

“Right, but I think you would have dismissed me already if that was a dealbreaker.”

Draco grinned. “You _can_ learn. Yes. I want—a chance to get to know you. You’ve essentially been getting to know me from a distance, and doing things for me you thought would give me a peaceful life. Now I want you to be part of that life. For a while, at least. Give me a chance. Stand at my side.”

Harry’s flush came back just as it was subsiding, and he inclined his head with a small, graceful smile. “Of course.”

Draco looked at him thoughtfully, reaching up to slide one hand through Harry’s thick hair. Harry’s eyes fluttered closed in response. Draco felt his stomach clench and ache deliciously.

“Just how much do you fancy me?” It came out as a whisper even though Draco didn’t mean it to.

“I—tried to keep it at bay because I wanted you to live and I never thought you wouldn’t want to get married, but—quite a lot, given all that.”

Harry’s voice was strangled. Draco smiled slowly. He hadn’t thought a lot about fancying Harry Potter before this, but that was before Harry Potter had fought for him and wounded himself for him and come back to being human on _Draco’s_ say-so, not any of his friends’.

“Then I want to try something,” he said, and leaned forwards, and gently tilted his lips against Harry’s.


	8. Free the Resistance

The kiss was _extraordinary_.

Harry had spent so much time daydreaming, anticipating, what it would be like. And then he would wake up from the daydream and tell himself not to be a fool. Draco was either straight or would want to get married and have children so as not to destroy his family line. Fantasizing like this was…misguided at best, stupid at worst.

It seemed that, for once, the daydream was closer to reality than Harry’s pessimism.

Draco’s hand was in his hair and pressing down, rumpling up little curls that made Harry’s scalp tingle. His other hand clasped Harry’s shoulder and pulled him in, and his tongue shot sparks up Harry’s spine just from being in his mouth, and his panting huffed gently across Harry’s cheeks, and even his _breath_ smelled good.

Harry moaned. He couldn’t help it. Draco was just overwhelming all his senses, and it was so…

Draco froze for a moment at the moan. Harry jerked his head back, panicked. If Draco changed his mind, if he suddenly woke up and realized what he was doing and that it might not be a good idea, Harry didn’t know what he would do.

But it seemed the moan had been a different kind of signal, because Draco gave a guttural noise and seized hold of Harry’s throat and _reeled_ him back into the kiss. Harry went, melting with relief, smoothing his hands up and down Draco’s arms. God, even his muscles seemed to bulge and ripple under his fingers differently than the muscles of any other man he’d ever touched.

_Then again, I wasn’t in love before._

Harry shuddered and pressed closer. For just a few minutes, he wanted to forget the rest of the world existed.

*

Draco finally broke off the kiss because it became obvious that Harry wouldn’t, even when he was swaying from lack of air and making exhausted sounds. He gently traced the curve of Harry’s cheekbone and watched his dazed eyes flutter open.

“You are something, you know that?” Draco whispered.

“That’s—what I wanted to hear.”

“Why those specific words?” Draco became aware he was whispering, even though there was really no reason to do so, and shook his head a little at himself.

“Because I spent so many years thinking I would be nothing to you, out of necessity.” Harry touched his shoulder as if the curve of the bone was a miracle. “Because of course your loyalty to your family would have to come first.” He looked up, and his eyes were misty. “I can’t tell you how glad I am that I was wrong.”

Draco grabbed Harry’s hand and kissed the palm. Even the slight touch of his breath made Harry whimper, so Draco decided to try the tip of his tongue. Harry shifted and dropped one hand as if he either wanted to prevent Draco from seeing the line of his cock or wanted to wank right here and now.

The thought made Draco so hot that he regretted they were in the middle of the Ministry. He contented himself with catching Harry’s other hand and saying, “Later, I promise, I’m going to make you feel so good.”

Harry swallowed, concentrated, and let his shoulders relax, nodding. “All—all right.” He tilted his head at the door then, and his eyes flickered with concern. “Ron and Hermione are probably wondering what’s going on.”

“Let them wonder.” Draco held Harry’s eyes until he smiled, a small one that seemed more genuine than the big ones Draco occasionally saw in photographs on the front page of the _Prophet_.

“Maybe they can,” said Harry. “But we need to figure out where the smugglers in your Manor are actually coming from, and whether your father’s contacts are involved. And your friends.” His hand caught Draco’s and squeezed a little.

Draco sighed. Harry was right. He was being sensible. Draco was the one who supposedly had the kind of brainpower that meant he would make a _sensible_ decision. That meant not doing things like having sex with Harry right in the middle of the Ministry.

But he wanted to promise himself something first, before he actually put it off.

“You’ll let me make you come if we’re in some place other than the Ministry tonight?” he asked softly.

Harry’s eyes widened. Then he said, “Only if you make me the same promise.”

Draco had to close his eyes and breathe hard for a few seconds to throw off temptation. Then he nodded tightly, and Harry nodded back and went and opened the door, calling cheerfully to his friends.

*

_We have this to look forward to._

Harry held his temper and his lust tightly under control as he spoke with Ron and Hermione, making them laugh even as he talked about the way that his transformation back from peacock to human had been so _simple._ And the whole time, he had to fight against looking at Draco, who strolled down the corridor beside them with his hands in his pockets.

_I'll get to look at him later. I'll get to make him come later. He promised._

But Harry only managed to shake the image of what he would get to do later off when he remembered the danger the smugglers posed to Draco.

_I'll get to do nothing at all if he's in prison because some misguided Auror weighed the evidence against him up wrong._

"Do you think we ought to go to your house and catch them in the act?" Harry asked, interrupting Ron as he started to make a joke about peacocks and cocks that Harry was, quite frankly, _not_ obliged to listen to. "Or should we contact one of your friends and make them think you've reconsidered about joining them in smuggling?"

A thoughtful look crept over Draco's face, and he nodded. "I don't perform a Patronus well, so I would have to send them owl. That would give us some more time to set up an ambush, don't you think?"

"You don't perform a Patronus well?"

Draco gave him a long, smoky look. Ron and Hermione just stopped walking and waited, oblivious. Harry knew they'd stopped walking because he and Draco had, not because they sensed the undercurrent that was flowing past them.

"I usually don't think I have a memory that's happy enough. But we can work on fixing that later."

Harry's lips tingled, his hands ached, and he barely managed to break the gaze and look away to nod. "Of course. Of course that's something we can talk about later." He broke off his speaking then, because he was babbling.

"Harry? Are you okay?"

Hermione, of course. Harry gave her a faint smile and said, “Yeah. It’s just overwhelming to be back in human form, you know?”

“I know! Your senses must have been so different as a peacock. How did you cope with not being able to smell anything? I know most birds don’t have much of a sense of smell. Or did you? If there was only a way to talk about some of this with Muggle scientists who could believe us instead of having to—”

“Granger,” Draco interrupted firmly. “We were discussing ways to catch the smugglers in the act, not make use of Harry’s experience in Muggle investigations.”

Hermione blushed in mortification. Harry caught her hand and squeezed it. “It’s fine. I’ll talk with you about it later.” Then he faced Draco, and tried to ignore the glint and the heat in his eyes. He’d been waiting without hope for years; this was only a few more hours. “Which friend do you think we should send it to?”

“Pansy,” Draco said, after a perceptible hesitation. “She’s the one who has the more profound betrayal. Unless it was Blaise alone. But I don’t think so.”

“Why more profound?” Ron asked.

“Because she kept trying to get me to date her. If she thinks she can get away with asking that, when all the time she was deceiving me…”

Harry wanted so badly to take Draco into his arms and show him why he didn’t need to worry about Pansy ever again. But he held back his impulse and nodded. “All right. What are you going to say in the letter?”

“That I’m reconsidering the opportunity she talked about, but I don’t want to leave the Manor’s grounds because that’s the only place I’m protected. That should convince her I don’t know about the hole in the wards that let the smugglers in, either. Let her show up and give me her best pitch.”

Draco’s eyes were narrowed, the muscles in his arms and legs surging. Harry swallowed back the temptation to touch his shoulder and turned to Ron. “Can you convince a detachment of Aurors to be in place by—would eight be enough time, Draco?”

Ron raised his eyebrows as if asking why he was calling a Malfoy by his first name, but nodded even as Draco did. “There are a few blokes who owe me favors and a few others who are really frustrated by this case. They’ll come for a chance of catching the guilty ones. Not all of them are convinced Malfoy is innocent, though.”

“That’s all right. I’m perfectly willing to remain in the house or do whatever else I need to convince them,” said Draco, his voice soft and sincere.

“And I’ll go and talk to Robards and Calzade, so they can stop thinking Draco turned me into a peacock on purpose.”

“I don’t think Calzade ever believed that, mate.”

“Anyway, they need to see.” Harry turned and held out his hand to Draco. “I’ll see you tonight, then. Or in a few hours, once you get an answer back from Parkinson.” He paused. “What happens if you don’t get an answer?”

“She will,” said Draco, in a voice as dry as a summer riverbed. “She’s been trying to persuade me for too long to turn her back on this.” He touched Harry’s hand and met his eyes. “And if I hint that I’m coming around on the matter of marrying her, too, then she’ll come running.”

Harry clenched his teeth, acknowledging both his own jealousy and Draco’s expert manipulation of it. “All right. We’ll be there. I’ll Floo you in a couple of hours to discuss our positioning.”

“Looking forward to it,” Draco said, in another smoldering voice, and turned and left the Ministry with long strides.

“Oh, Harry, I hope you know what you’re doing,” Hermione muttered, falling into step beside him as he made his way towards the Minister’s office. Ron had gone to gather the Aurors they would need.

“What do you mean?”

Hermione gave him a stern stare. All right, she wasn’t oblivious to the undercurrents then. “I know he’s not exactly evil, but he’s not exactly _nice_.”

“That’s for me to deal with,” Harry said quietly, and braced himself for the confrontation with Robards. He barely saw Hermione’s nod out of the corner of her eye.

“I know. I just hope Ron and I won’t have to pick up the pieces afterwards.”

Harry gave her a smile that he hoped was more convincing than it felt, and knocked on the office door.

*

Harry had to clench his fingers into his knees and breathe a little. He was still remembering the way Robards had reacted to the news that Harry had come back to human form. Calzade had been more understanding and had acted as a restraining manacle on the Head Auror’s reaction as best he could, but it still _stung_.

“Harry. Mate. If any of the smugglers have wards that sense strong emotion up, then we’re going to get revealed.”

Harry shook his head and leaned back against the gnarled tree that he and Ron stood under, with the rest of the detachment of the Aurors a few steps behind them. Ahead, the walls and wards of Malfoy Manor shimmered. “It’s just Parkinson coming tonight. No one else.”

"That's what we think _may_ happen. But Malfoy couldn't guarantee she wouldn't contact anyone else."

That, at least, was true, and Harry spent a little more time breathing softly through his nose, gaze fixed on the walls in case something changed. Idly, he tried to trace the line of the defensive spell that had turned him into a peacock, but it was far too well-buried in the general clutter of magic over the gardens.

"All right there?"

"Yeah, Ron. Thanks."

"I reckon being a peacock and dating a Malfoy messes up your systems for a while."

Harry paused, then twisted around to face Ron. "So you know that I'm dating him, then. Or I want to."

"That's clear enough." Ron was the one watching the gardens this time, so intently that Harry thought he was probably trying to hold off a blush. "I mean, I can't understand why. But I've dealt with trainees who can't understand why I married Hermione. So I'm trying to be gentle with you, too."

Harry grinned, seeing an opportunity to get some of his own back. "Well, I could describe the way his back muscles bunch when my hand's resting on them, or how he gasps when I kiss him, or--"

Ron's scandalized groan made Harry lower his laughter, since some of the other Aurors were grumbling behind them. And then he saw the swift flash of a pink light near the top of a window, just visible beyond the wall, that was the signal they were waiting for.

"Pink," Ron expressed as they crept in.

"Hard to mistake for anything else. He's not going to use white with all these peacocks about."

Ron started to complain again, but a different person hissed them silent, and Harry lifted his wand. Even though he would never have revenge on Lucius, the person who had actually turned him into a bird, he could feel the enjoyment fizzing like champagne in his chest anyway.

_She could have got Draco arrested. She could have got him captured and maybe disbelieved unless he wanted to take Veritaserum, if it was any Auror other than me who came here._

_Yes, I'm ready._

_*_

"Thank you for coming, Pansy."

Draco hoped his voice was holding the proper balance between haughty and graceful as he turned away from her to pour the wine. At least he had linked the rose light he flashed for the Aurors to another spell long before this meeting. All he'd had to do when Pansy entered via the Floo was tap his wand on the table, and the light flashed outside.

"I want to know how you changed your mind, Draco."

Draco was also prepared for this, and turned around with a tight smile. "Did you know I went to see my father in Azkaban today?'

"I—no."

"He told me that I was wasting my life," Draco said, in the sure and certain knowledge that Pansy wouldn't have had any spies lurking on the island who could contradict him. "At least he'd done what he wanted, he said, and he'd known the price before he began. But he said I was wasting away, neither taking my pleasure nor enjoying being good." He swallowed a gulp of his wine and only then saw Pansy touch her glass to her lips. "He's right."

Pansy smiled in the way Draco used to like, as if the sun was rising, and put her glass aside. “He is,” she said. “You really need to think about yourself more, Draco, not the rules and laws of the society that exiled us.” She held out her hand, and Draco came and took it. “They won’t have us, so we have to make our own way.”

“Can you, though?” Draco let doubt slip in. “I mean, what does this get you that’s so much better than what you’d have otherwise?”

“A lot more money, for one.” Pansy winked at him. “And the thought of tricking the Ministry all the time. You ought to _see_ the look on those Aurors’ faces when they lose track of us again.”

“Oh, you actually went on the missions yourself?” Draco pulled at the collar of his robes a little. “I’m not sure that I’m actually—able to do that.”

“I did it because it’s fun. But you don’t have to. As long as you can lend us some of your money, and the safe place you were already giving us without knowing it.”

Pansy had a little secret smile on her face. Draco lowered his head, and then nodded after a second. “I did figure that part out. Of course, I feel stupid for not figuring it out before.”

“Dear Draco, why should you?” Pansy caught his hand again. “Come out and I’ll summon a few of the others and introduce you. They’ll be just as pleased they don’t have to sneak around anymore. It was fun sometimes, but tiresome more often.”

Draco gave her a tight smile he hoped she would think was due to nerves, and pretended not to see that she was leaning towards him as if hoping for a kiss. He urged her gently to the side and had her stand up when she yawned. “Come on, then. Let’s go outside and summon them before you fall asleep.”

Pansy laughed. “You’re still as witty as ever, Draco.”

Draco didn’t think it was particularly witty, but he kept a frozen little smile on his face as they moved outside and towards the far walls where the Aurors would be waiting for him to drop the wards. They couldn’t come through them without injuring themselves or getting turned into peacocks.

_In a few minutes, this will all be over. One way or the other._


	9. Party Time

“Do you see any sign of anyone else yet?” Ron breathed the words practically against Harry’s ear, and Harry knew his wits were at least slightly rattled because the first thing he thought of was how jealous the whispering would make Draco.

Harry literally shook the thought away, and muttered, “No. But you know how good they are at sneaking around.”

Ron nodded and fell behind him to pace in between Harry and the other Aurors. They were wearing modified Disillusionment Charms and others that would muffle most noise. The Auror Department had had a few embarrassing incidents where completely invisible or inaudible Aurors had captured each other instead of the criminals. Nothing like that was going to happen tonight.

Harry found himself tensing as they went over the wall, through the hole Draco had arranged in the wards. But he didn’t turn into a peacock, and neither did anyone else. They were still on their feet, moving steadily forwards.

The Elder Wand thrummed in his hand.

Harry understood the signal without knowing how he did. He stepped back once, jammed an elbow into Ron’s ribs, and caught the attention of the others with a little flex of his neck. He nodded to the shimmering of other Disillusionment Charms that were forming off to the side, moving too fast to blend in with the night. They were near one of the flowerbeds where Harry had found the footprints.

“Didn’t hear them?” Ron asked as a question against his ear.

“They muffled the Apparition.”

And strolling towards both groups of them, coming from the house, were Draco—his hair unmistakable even in the starlight—and Parkinson. Harry nudged Ron again, and he fell back one step with a nod. Then he and the other Aurors began to spread out, slowly so their charms would have time to adjust to the background, and surround the smugglers.

The smugglers had already dropped their own disguises. They were all staring at Draco with fierce looks and fierce grips on their wands. Harry had no doubt they would harm or threaten him if they had to. They probably wouldn’t kill him only because that would make the wards try to expel them off the land at once.

Draco’s voice was audible as they came closer. “I didn’t hear you summon them, Pansy.”

“It’s a twist on a ring, darling. Nothing so vulgar as a spoken word.” Parkinson tucked her hand into Draco’s elbow and nestled up to him.

Harry could feel Ron flickering an eyebrow at him without even looking around. They had sometimes wondered how the smugglers communicated, and a slight twist to a ring was a better idea than some they’d had. They’d known the rings did _something_ , but the spell must rely on another ring in someone else’s possession, so they couldn’t be sure what.

The rational part of Harry’s brain thought about that. The rest of his brain entertained the idea of marching over to Parkinson and explaining to her in small spells why she should not be touching Draco like that.

Harry calmed himself with a harsh breath— _this is harder for him than for you—_ and moved slightly to the side as Draco and Parkinson walked past him.

Draco glanced straight at him, or at least Harry could have sworn he did, and his eyes seemed to catch the light like an animal’s. Harry did his best to smile in reassurance, but his lips were strangely stiff. He ended up standing there and feeling like an idiot while Draco swept Parkinson on to the place where the other Aurors and the smugglers waited.

Someone, though, had sensed something, and shouts abruptly exploded from the night. Parkinson vibrated to a stop and shrieked, “Draco! How could someone _get_ through your wards?”

Harry immediately went to work placing anti-Apparition spells over Parkinson’s immediate area. She would decide in a moment the only thing that would have let enemies through the wards—Draco himself—and try to flee.

Draco, however, separated himself from Parkinson and stepped back, shaking his head. “It’s over, Pansy. And as for coming through the wards, how long did _you_ do that before you let me know about it?”

Parkinson turned to him with an open mouth and staring eyes. Harry tensed, expecting her to either run or try to Apparate. The spells he’d used were limited-area; large-area ones needed a license and the permission of the Ministry. He was in good enough shape to catch her in a sprint.

Instead, Parkinson shrieked and flung herself towards Draco, a blue spell like forks of lightning reaching out of her wand.

Harry didn’t think. _He_ flung himself, too, but it was between Draco and Parkinson. And between the spell and Draco.

*

Draco had a shield lifted on instinct the instant Pansy screamed. That had always been the sign that she didn’t know what to do and was about to lash out at someone else.

But something muffled and moving hit the shield instead of Pansy’s spell, and bounced off it. Draco stared, not understanding. Then the blue lightning of the spell lit up a figure writhing in pain and muffled under what looked almost like a coat of dark, rippling water.

_Harry. He was Disillusioned._

_He’d better hope he survives the spell so I can kill him._

Pansy was casting another spell, rage driving her through what must have been a confusion as great as Draco’s. Draco coolly hit her with a special Stunner one of his ancestors had developed, one that would pass through a shield from the back. Pansy thumped to the ground, and the sounds of battle washed over Draco as though a bubble of silence had been punctured with her fall.

He didn’t care. He had an impossible, ignorant, arrogant _prick_ on his hands whose suffering he had to stop. And whose ears he had to fill.

Grimly, Draco cast the countercurse to Pansy’s. Harry relaxed with a gasp and a limp surge of his head that revealed he was probably on the edge of unconsciousness. Draco didn’t actually care very much. Harry’s pain in the seconds before Draco could get to him would have been extreme, and his nerves could be affected in a less severe way, but a similar one, to how the nerves of those tortured by Cruciatus could be.

Draco immediately began to cast what healing spells he knew, and revived Harry a moment later. Harry blinked at him and turned his head to the side. “Where’s Parkinson?” he slurred, mouth trembling.

“Stunned. And the rest of your Aurors are fighting,” Draco said pleasantly. Just as he had thought would happen, Harry tried to dig his hands into the ground beneath him and stand up to join the battle. Draco flicked his wand again and he thumped back, in _Incarcerous_ bonds. “Ah, ah, ah. Not so quickly, Harry.”

Harry blinked at him. “But you’re not hurt.” His voice was thick was something that might have been joy. Draco decided to take it that way. “And I’m not hurt, so—”

“She tortured you with the Nerve Lightning Curse,” Draco said flatly. “Yes, you’re hurt, and yes, you’re staying here because you would do no good in the battle anyway. And because we’re going to have a little talk about your propensity to risk yourself for me.”

“I thought you _liked_ it.”

The way Harry accented that one word made a sharp shiver creep up Draco’s spine. He resisted the urge to give in to it, though, instead smiling blandly in response and tapping his wand against his thigh. “I liked it when it happened once. I dislike it more when it happens again and it becomes clear you could get yourself killed or wounded trying to keep me safe.”

“A small price to pay.”

Draco leaned over until he was staring directly into Harry’s eyes, and said, “No. It’s. Not.”

Harry blinked and said nothing. Draco sighed and tapped his own wand against the Elder Wand. A moment later he thought that had been a stupid idea, but the Elder Wand did nothing except give a low hum, as if Draco had crossed one of his own wards. “You have this. You could have cast almost any spell with any power that would have got in Pansy’s way, and probably used death magic I don’t know about. Why did you leap in between?”

“I—honestly didn’t think of anything else.”

Draco nodded sharply. “And _that’s_ the part that has to change. I understand why you haven’t done it this way up until now, Harry, but now that you’ve got someone who insists on you being alive and unwounded, you have to.”

*

_Now that you have someone…_

Harry swallowed. And swallowed again. Not because Draco’s words had literally rendered him speechless, but because he was going to say something awfully _stupid_ if he spoke just now.

That was what he’d wanted. Someone—and he had daydreamed about Draco but never assumed it would come true—who would have his back, who would love him, who would insist on privileges Harry would never give to anyone else. And suddenly he had that person, and that person was unimpressed with the way Harry was doing things.

 _I’ll change. I_ want _to._

Harry reached up and clasped Draco’s hand, wringing it so tightly that Draco winced and stared down at him. But it was the only way he could think of to convey, without the words that would have been so difficult, what this meant to him.

“Thank you,” he breathed. “ _Thank_ you.”

“Oi, mate!”

That was Ron, coming towards them with his robes ripped and a slight burn mark on his face. He stopped and abruptly turned his back. “I’ll wait until whatever’s happening over here is…done,” he said, waving a vague hand.

Draco snickered and rocked back on his heels, levering Harry up with an easy flip of his arm. “Sorry to interrupt your battle, Weasley. I trust that you didn’t miss Harry too much in the final conclusion?”

“Considering he was always supposed to stay and arrest Parkinson,” Ron said dryly, still facing the other way, “no.”

Draco nodded and said, “Well, I don’t know about arrested, but _stopped_ , certainly,” and Harry hoped that he was hiding his blush as he ventured over to look at the other smugglers.

They’d been caught completely by surprise—probably the only reason they’d been able to take them with minor Auror casualties, Harry thought, limited to injuries like the one Ron had and a nasty green growth on Auror Ferguson’s leg that had already been frozen dead and had stopped growing. They’d have to go to St. Mungo’s to remove it all the way. The smugglers were mostly Stunned, but a few, awake in bonds and wandless, scowled at him.

And at Draco. Harry murmured without looking back, “You’ll have to watch your arse for a while.”

“I’m sure you can help me with that.”

Harry shuddered and arched his neck a little. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt this wild, this out of control. And he couldn’t even _yield_ to it, because that would put Draco in more danger. These were already people who would attack Harry because of who he was. He didn’t want them attacking him because he was Draco’s lover.

“Snap out of it,” Draco said, in a way that told Harry he’d noticed.

Harry nodded, and stepped away from Draco to question the prisoners. There was always someone who would snap back at the sight of his, as they liked to put it, “smug face.”

*

“Good job, Malfoy. We couldn’t have done it without you.”

Weasley recited the words in a monotone, his gaze locked on the ground. Draco restrained his laughter and simply nodded. “You’re welcome,” he added a second later, when he realized Weasley wouldn’t look up to see the nod.

“I wonder whether your father will change his tune when he hears we’ve captured them.”

Draco blinked. It was something he honestly hadn’t considered. “I’m not planning on telling my father.”

“Really?” Weasley frowned. “I was hoping he might be startled to hear it and release some valuable information.”

“He won’t. Weasley, my father isn’t sane. I doubt he even knew the full extent of the smuggling plan, if he knew anything about it at all; maybe all of it developed after his trial. You’ll need to talk to Pansy about that, and Blaise if she implicates him.”

“Do you think she will?”

Draco shrugged. “Probably.” He thought Pansy would implicate almost anyone to save herself, but on the other hand, she’d held her silence and secrecy about the smugglers for far longer than he’d thought she could. She had dropped hints around him, but never anything major enough to make him think this many people were coming and going at the Manor on a regular basis.

“Good,” Weasley said. “Good, then.” He paused, then added, “The battle went too easily. These are probably the ones who could get here on a moment’s notice. Not all of them, and not their best fighters.” He sighed. “The more information we have about them, the better.”

“But you don’t need _me_ for that.”

“No.” Weasley gave him a doubtful look. “Harry will still be working the case, though.”

“As if I want to control that.” Draco rolled his eyes when he saw the way Weasley looked at him.

“I heard some of what you said to him. You want to control him _sometimes._ ”

“I want to stop him from jumping in front of curses for me when he can damn well find another way to stop them,” Draco said harshly. Just _thinking_ about it made him see the blood on Harry’s white feathers again, and that made him want to strangle someone. Preferably someone who had a human neck now. “With the power he has, there’s no reason he needs to do that. He’s strong enough, he’s smart enough. He’ll find some other way.”

Weasley listened with his eyebrows rising further and further towards his hairline, and then he nodded. “Well, if you set it up like that, he probably will.”

“Probably will what?” Harry came jogging back from the questioning, grinning. “That tall one over there revealed some things he shouldn’t have, Ron. I know where a couple caches of their goods are.”

“You’ll learn how to use the Elder Wand and your magic in a way that doesn’t damage your body all the time,” Draco said, and slid an arm around Harry’s shoulders.

“Yes, I will,” said Harry, exactly as if he had always been planning to agree to that, and then nodded to Weasley. “Do you want me to just tell you, or to write it down?”

Weasley’s face turned a shade of red that was brilliant even in the dim light from the Aurors’ wands. “It was _one time_ that I forgot to use the Pensieve!”

“And the time that Hermione asked you to tell that lawyer she was working with that news about house-elves, and the time that Calzade thought _I_ was the one who lost a report that never existed, and—”

“Fine, _fine_.” Weasley tossed his hands up. “Write it down if you must.”

Draco blinked as he watched Harry grin and take out parchment and ink. He wondered why Harry was writing it down instead of simply accompanying Weasley and the other Aurors back to the Ministry and telling Calzade, or the Head Auror, or whoever needed to hear it, himself.

Then Harry caught his eye and gave him a smoldering smile, and Draco felt his chest shudder with his heartbeat. Of course, the promises they had made each other. He had honestly almost forgotten about that.

Now, with the way that Harry’s eyes and smile sparked as he wrote down several lines rapidly, he wondered how that was _possible_.

*

Harry handed the list of cache locations to Ron. The other Aurors had already Disapparated with their captives, and now only Parkinson was left, lying senseless on the grass behind Ron.

“There you are,” he said. “I’m sure Draco is eager to put his wards back up so that people will stop Apparating in and out.”

Ron stared at him, his gaze saying more clearly than words that he had thought there would be _one_ more Apparition. Harry tilted his head haughtily upwards, feeling the flush course like river water through his face.

“Right,” Ron said finally, grabbed Parkinson, and Apparated with a shake of his head. A moment later, Harry saw the air shift in an intangible ripple that meant the wards were back up.

And then Draco grabbed him and kissed him so much that his mouth ached the way his heart used to, when he thought he would never have anyone.

Harry cupped his hand behind Draco’s neck and kissed back. They had promises to keep.


	10. Commitment

“You’re so good,” Harry gasped as he felt Draco’s hands dip teasingly down his back, touching places that had never felt arousing before. Draco had him pinned against the wall beside the front door of the Manor, his head dipping constantly to nip at Harry’s neck.

Draco lifted his head and blew gently across the area he’d been biting. “And you’re safe.”

“That’s—a weird thing to say,” Harry complained. He didn’t mean to have the little gap of breath in the middle of his words, but Draco had chosen that moment to bend down and start kissing him again.

“You’re far too coherent,” Draco murmured, moving back a step and studying Harry as if he was a puzzle. “Come.” He locked his fingers around Harry’s hand and tugged abruptly, pulling Harry away from the wall and into his arms again. Then they Apparated.

They landed in the middle of a bed that seemed as big as a meadow, and Harry rolled over and stared at Draco. Draco smirked at him, said, “I can Apparate in my own house if I want,” and pulled his shirt over his head.

Harry licked his lips and forgot about the little speech he was going to make, about how wasteful it was to Apparate when you could just walk up the stairs instead. He was too busy staring at Draco’s muscles. Honestly, you would have thought that _both_ of them worked as Aurors, with the way they rippled as Draco stalked towards the bed.

“I’m showing you mine,” Draco murmured, bending so that he said the words almost against Harry’s lips. “Show me yours. Come on, Harry.” His hand slid up and down, caressing, working out little shivers that made Harry’s hands shake as he reached for his Auror robes.

And Draco’s eyes continued to devour him as he watched Harry shuck the robes, and take off the shirt he wore beneath. “Shirt?” he asked softly, touching it with his fingertips and then whistling a little. “ _Acromantula_ silk?”

Harry flushed as he pulled that off, too. “It’s soft, and the robes rub on my skin, and I can afford it.”

When he could see Draco again past the shirt collar, he realized Draco was smiling at him. He put a knee on the bed between Harry’s legs and gently pushed until Harry fell backwards. Then he traced a finger down the line of Harry’s erection, straining against his pants. Harry groaned and grabbed Draco’s hand, repeating the tracing line more forcefully.

“I wasn’t questioning your taste,” Draco whispered. “Just surprised that you had such _good_ taste. But I should have known that, shouldn’t I? After all, you were lusting after me from a distance.”

Harry opened his eyes, gone hazy as Draco plucked the glasses from his face. Draco was smiling, though. Harry thought he could have been waking up after a Concussion Curse and he would have seen that.

“You’re beautiful.”

Harry felt his dying blush come back again, full force. “You don’t have to say that,” he mumbled, an automatic reaction as he reached up to feel the edges of Draco’s muscles and spine. People were always telling him that he was beautiful. Not all of them could _mean_ it. Harry never wanted Draco to feel like he was forced to compliment Harry.

Draco caught Harry’s wrist and turned it sideways, bestowing a sharp little bite over his pulse. Harry cried out. _That_ was arousing, too, like all the places Draco had found on his back. Who would have known?

“Don’t tell me what I can and cannot say,” Draco huffed, and lay down on top of Harry, with a groan as their still-clothed cocks touched. Harry found that he had better things to think about. He locked his hands on Draco’s shoulders and moved him back and forth.

Sparks showered up into his stomach. He lifted his hips. God, he could come like this, just rubbing against Draco, the way he might have in the Ministry if they’d continued to touch each other.

But Draco braced a hand on Harry’s shoulder and heaved himself back with a little gasp. His eyes shone at Harry. “Do you really want this to be over so quickly?”

“Want to _come_.”

“But think about how much better it will feel if we play with each other a bit first.”

Harry looked at him doubtfully. “That’s usually for later, right? We come fast, and then we can take it slow.”

Draco smiled and caught his hand, kissing his fingers this time, and nipping him again near his thumbnail. “We have so much time, Harry. So much time to play whatever games we want, fast or slow. But this time, _I’d_ like to do this.”

“Well, that’s all you had to say,” Harry muttered, and spread his legs.

He understood the expression that came over Draco’s face then, although he couldn’t put a name to it. He blushed again.

*

_Merlin, how is it that someone hasn’t snapped him up before now?_

But even as he hastily took off his own pants and trousers, Draco thought he could answer that question. Harry would have distrusted a lot of people who felt free to approach him. He would have thought they wanted to sleep with the Boy-Who-Lived, not him. Look at the way he had distrusted Draco’s compliment.

 _Well, he’ll get used to that,_ Draco thought complacently, and sat back to watch as Harry stared at him.

He kept looking at Draco’s cock in a way that made Draco waver. Maybe they _could_ come fast this time, and then they could go slow _next_ time.

But he had made up his mind, and he had asked, and he wanted to see if Harry would keep his promise almost as he much as he wanted Harry to touch him. After a second, Harry brought his legs back close to each other again and slowly squirmed out of his pants without taking his gaze off Draco.

“This would go faster if you could look away,” Draco finally murmured.

“You love it, don’t lie.”

Draco’s breath bounded in his chest. That came awfully close to something else, something that he didn’t think he could say right now.

But he didn’t _need_ to say it right now, with the way that Harry was appreciatively eyeing him. He contented himself with stretching and saying, “How do you want to do this?”

Harry let his legs flip open again and gave him a look that said Draco was being stupid.

“You have done this before?” Draco asked, as he stooped to pick up his wand and Summon lube. He tried not to mind showing Harry his arse; after all, he knew the attention he was getting was on the verge of drooling.

“Of _course_.”

“Well, you won’t want to do it with anyone after this,” Draco snapped, and the lube slammed into his palm.

“What is that, a threat to make it painful or a promise to keep me?”

Draco turned around, having heard the quiver in Harry’s voice this time. Harry was just as nervous as he was, and maybe more. After all, he was the one who had desired Draco from afar for years, and must hardly be able to believe that his fantasy was happening.

“Definitely the promise,” he whispered, and dipped his fingers into the lube.

Harry only wriggled in place, his face so vivid with delight that Draco paused and bowed his head a little to accept the tribute of it before he slid his fingers into Harry.

Harry held his breath. Draco slapped his stomach to get him to let it go. Harry grunted in annoyance and squinted at him. “I’ve done this before, but it’s been a long time.”

“Then you may have forgotten that you’re supposed to relax if you want to actually let me into you.”

Those words did the trick. Harry mouthed them to himself, his eyes fastened to Draco’s face, as he let his muscles unclench, and Draco’s fingers slid further in. Draco felt around a long time, longer than he liked to take, for Harry’s prostate, while Harry’s eyes softened and he looked as if he was going to start some gentle speech.

Then his head tilted back, and his eyes widened, and he gave a breathless grunt.

“I take it _that’s_ it,” Draco panted. It actually didn’t feel any different from the rest of Harry’s arse to him, but he faithfully prodded it, and Harry bobbed his head and widened his legs until his knees touched the sides of the bed. Draco thought he would have kept spreading them if he’d had more muscle.

_I’m being welcomed inside him._

Draco bent over and kissed Harry fiercely, getting a mouthful of curling tongue and passionate energy, before he curled his fingers and withdrew them. Then he slathered himself with lube, and put some on Harry’s arse, too. Harry only grunted a little, and his legs flexed as if he was still seeking to spread them.

“You can hold onto me when I’m inside,” Draco said to him, and then began the slow, sliding, wonderful process.

The lube glistened and squeaked between them. Harry kept his legs open as if he didn’t believe Draco until Draco was more than halfway in; then he reached up and scratched his nails down Draco’s back.

Draco gasped. He’d never been one for having his lovers claw him, but this was really _working_ for him. He snapped his hips in, and Harry responded with a sigh that just missed being a grunt.

“All right?”

“ _Move_.”

Draco supposed he was lucky to get that much, when Harry sounded as if he hardly had a breath left.

Draco did move. And it was marvelous.

Harry’s hands closed on his back and almost slit ribbons of blood to run free, and it was prickling, strong, impossible to ignore. His heels kicked and drummed the bed, and Draco couldn’t ignore the sound, either. Harry was all around him, squeezing and pulling.

_God. I have this. I want this. I want him._

Draco’s eyes snapped open, and he watched Harry’s red, flushed face, and his hair flaring over the pillow, and the way he licked his lips. Yes, maybe it was strange that someone hadn’t snapped him up long since and maybe Harry distrusted too many people who he thought only wanted to sleep with the Boy-Who-Lived, but who _cared_?

Draco had him now.

*

Harry could hear the groans breaking like bubbles past his ears. His skin shook and his body clasped Draco as if he was someone else, someone who had even more passion than Harry had been able to envision himself having.

But it didn’t matter, because Draco was here now. Firm beneath his hands, salty on his tongue, loud in his ears.

Harry raised his head as best as he could when he was rocking and sliding across the bed and gave Draco another kiss, this one on the chest. Draco stared down at him, a light spreading in his eyes.

“Yes,” Harry said, and then managed to straighten himself out for a minute when Draco wasn’t pounding his arse and thrust downwards once.

That drove Draco _crazy_. Harry found himself laughing breathlessly as Draco froze, then began to thrust again, and again, and again, and again, until Harry’s doubts were shaken out of him. Fucked out of him. Because Draco was here.

He wasn’t going anywhere.

Harry kept kissing Draco’s arms, his chest, his nipples, while Draco braced himself with hands on the pillow and sheets, and rode Harry until both of them were ready to be ripped apart with the pleasure.

Harry kept squeezing until his took him, though. Because he knew that he didn’t want to go alone, and he wanted to share this with Draco as Draco was sharing so much with him, and when his orgasm seized him, he had the satisfaction of wetness spurting inside him and knowing he had succeeded.

*

Draco lay so heavily on Harry he worried for a second he was crushing him. But he would just have to lie there and go on crushing him, for the moment, because the thought of stirring wasn’t something he could muster any interest in.

“You—all right, Draco?”

Draco snorted breathlessly and sat up, fixing his eyes on Harry. Looking at him was worth sitting up for. “Of course I am. Shouldn’t I be asking you that question instead of the other way around?”

“Like you would have hurt me,” Harry scoffed. He reached up and rested his palm over Draco’s heart. Draco blinked at the intimate gesture, but Harry didn’t act as if he’d done anything unusual. “But I wanted to know if you were all right with this. With everything. Because I don’t think I could give it up. Not now.”

Draco’s breath caught at the directness, and the power in Harry’s eyes, and the vulnerability shining there, too. Harry knew he might be hurt, but he had gone ahead and admitted this anyway.

Draco reached down and caught Harry’s hand, gently wrapping his fingers around Harry’s, running a tickling touch of nail down the center of Harry’s palm until he laughed breathlessly. “This is something I want, too,” Draco said.

He thought his words sounded pathetic, since he was hardly able to say them, but Harry lunged up and kissed him clumsily, wetly, enthusiastically. Draco ended up bowling down onto the bed again, and Harry rolled up on top of him and gazed at him in the way of someone who was happy about something they’d purchased.

“I want to say one other thing, too, though,” Draco said.

“Go ahead.” Harry wriggled his elbows and seemed to settle more heavily in place.

“I really _do_ want you to stop leaping in between me and danger. Or even between other people and danger. You have the Elder Wand now, and you’ve put aside whatever qualms kept you from mastering it. _Use it_.”

Harry nodded slowly. “I could feel the wand pulsing in my hand while Parkinson’s curse was running through me, you know? As if it was trying to punish me for not using it to stop her. The Wand isn’t going to let me forget about it for long. I promise to try better.”

Even if it was the Elder Wand and not Harry who had decided that change, at least Draco was satisfied it was going to happen. He reached up and kissed Harry soundly, enough to make Harry melt and run like honey down his chest. “Then let’s go to sleep. I assume you probably need to be up early in the morning to work on that smuggling case.”

“They’ll let me have some time off,” Harry murmured sleepily into his hair. “I was a peacock until this morning, for Merlin’s sake.”

“And who was responsible for getting you back to humanity? And capturing Pansy? And making sure that you got to capture the smugglers—”

“Fine, you can have the morning off, too.”

Draco clasped his arms around Harry’s waist, and was happy.

*

Harry opened his eyes when a stray shaft of moonlight traveled through the curtains and struck his eyes. Rolling over, he considered Draco.

Draco was breathing in gentle silence, his breaths the only sound. His lips were parted, his hair tussled, and his back still marked with the scratches Harry had given him. He had one arm sprawled out where Harry had been resting until he moved.

Once, Harry had been almost afraid to get what he desired. He had been afraid that Draco wouldn’t live up to the image he’d built in his mind. How could he? Harry didn’t really _know_ Draco, or at least he’d thought he didn’t. He wanted him, he cared for him, but he’d thought it was better that they continue to go their separate ways. It was preferable to being disappointed, or just discarded when he tried to explain and Draco stared at him incredulously.

_I ought to have known he’d live up to it. This is Draco Malfoy we’re talking about._

Harry smiled and rolled back into the space he’d been. Draco’s arm immediately tightened, and he turned to bury his nose in Harry’s shoulder without ever waking up.

Harry closed his eyes, and rejoiced in having hands and arms and human lips and tongue, so that he could tell Draco in many different ways how much he was going to love him.

**The End.**


End file.
